The Democrats were furious Monday over eight senators who caved to support a deal to end the government shutdown that does not include the Affordable Care Act subsidies their party had spent weeks fighting for.
The offending lawmakers include Democratic Senators Dick Durbin, Tim Kaine, Jacky Rosen, John Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, and independent Senator Angus King, who claimed that they’d ensured a Senate vote on extending the tax credits. Their capitulation comes after House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted for weeks that he wouldn’t promise them a vote on anything, and even if he does follow through with a vote, it’s unlikely such a measure will pass the House.
Democratic lawmakers slammed their colleagues for forfeiting health care coverage for an estimated 5.1 million Americans by 2034 and increasing premiums across the marketplace.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders railed against the deal while speaking before the Senate Sunday. “If this vote succeeds, over 20 million Americans are gonna see at least a doubling in their premiums in the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “For certain groups of people, it will be a tripling and a quadrupling of their premiums. There are people who will now be paying 50 percent of their limited incomes for health care. Does anybody in the world think that makes sense?”
“We ensured a vote!”
Bullshit. Even if the vote happens, it won’t pass, and even if it did, Trump could veto it. This was the one chance to save the ACA and also to really damage Trumpism. The shutdown was devastating to the GOP and the Dems would have won eventually just like in 2019, but instead these 8 traitors are handing the country over when they’ve just had their only real opportunity to fight this administration.
Fuck them all. Every single one of them should be ejected from the caucus.
They held out for 40 days just to torture ppl who need benefits
Yep and Leadership sit this up so it look like it was 8 traitor. These were all safe seats. Its goddamn conspiracy. Fuck Chuck.
And this is why we need to shout down and muppet that blindly parrots “vote blue no matter who.” These folks rely on the flawed assumption that electing Democrats is the fastest way to fight authoritarianism. But if the party is actually just a scam? If it’s just controlled opposition? You have no great options at that point. At that point your only option is to ignore the fake opposition and push for a new left wing party, even if it takes you 20 years to implement. Voting for a captured opposition party is little more than an act of masturbation.
They held out for 40 days just to torture ppl who need benefits
Maybe when you lose your healthcare you will understand why they did it.
Edit:
Edited the post to include what I responded to, because it seems people miss the context.
I clearly support the attempt to save ACA. Not the 8 senators that quit.Are you implying I don’t already need the affordable care act? Because I do. They acted like they wouldn’t fucking cave for 40 days then these 8 go and say meh fuck it who cares. wtf was it all for then?
The sunk-cost fallacy isn’t a winning argument, here. But the goal of protecting healthcare for regular people is a strong enough goal that it doesn’t need sunk-cost. These 8 could have protected their people but jammed-out.
They’re saying that the fact that they folded makes all the harm of the last 40 days meaningless. These 8 motherfuckers waited until extra harm had been done before signing off on the harm caused by getting the ACA.
This outcome is the worst possible. If they’d been spineless 6 weeks ago they’d still be traitors, but this is somehow even worse.
They’re saying that the fact that they folded makes all the harm of the last 40 days meaningless.
Oh come on! It wasn’t meaningless! It was a cynical con to get votes that they abandoned as soon as the election was over!
You can say the same about every lost fight. With that mentality, nobody would ever fight for the right thing. Obviously it was an attempt to save ACA, then these 8 jumped ship, probably claiming the pain threshold had become too high.
It sucks, but you can’t say the fight didn’t have to be fought.
They know it won’t pass.
They’re relying on the old tactic of them getting that vote, then blaming progressives for failing to get it passed.
THESE are the Democrats that should be uprooted from the party and replaced with candidates that actually represent their voter base.
The fact that Dems has this many spoilers shows you that they aren’t really beating the controlled opposition claims.
We need a Democratic Party that fights back. Not one that caves to evil.
THIS is why many people on Lemmy are disillusioned by Democrats. Dems had only positive outcomes for themselves by letting the shutdown continue. They could have waited while Trump fucks the citizenry more and more, deepening their political capital for 2026.
Instead, all of the Dems who aren’t facing re-election next year, or have re-election in 2028 or 2030 voted to end the shutdown. These Dems have no opportunity loss for voting this way. Un-fucking-believable
On the other hand the end of ACA will hurt Trumpism a lot, since many of his voters were using this benefit
And if the vote happens and passes and people get to keep their health care, will you apologize to all these democrats and admit they made the right decision?
And if the vote never materializes, or ends in inevitable failure, will you apologize for posting stupid fucking hypotheticals like this one?
I will never apologize for hypotheticals. Even the stupid fucking ones!
But… What if you did?
Now that’s a stupid fucking hypothetical!
All the skies need the pies?
🥧
I will give you $100 if the vote passes. 100 United States Dollars if they get the vote, it passes Congress, and Trump doesn’t veto it. Hold me to this. I will send you $100 dollars, via PayPal, Venmo, Cash app, or a fucking wire transfer. (If you wait for me to get paid, depesning on when the vote passes.)
Republicans won’t allow it. To think they ever will is a foolish wish. You might as well ask Trump to suddenly become a good person like he was haunted by 3 sprits in the middle of the night.
They had the the Trump and Republicans in a gambit of chess, and then sacrificed a Queen and Rook to just get rid of their possible Checkmate. And that’s somehow smart when they lost more pieces and haven’t won anything, just lost more things we could have kept around.
This is absolutely not going to be what happens or it would’ve happened already
I think raising attention to this issue is the only thing Democrats could hope to accomplish. And they did it with the shutdown.
Now if Republicans do not hold a vote, or if they vote against it, there will be much more negative attention given to them.
I believe this funding only goes until Jan 31st. So if they don’t pass the healthcare in December, the government will just be shut down again.
What are you smoking? 8 Democrats have now cosigned a poison pill of throwing millions of people off healthcare in addition to everything trump is doing with the government.
Not a single concession from republicans. This outcome is only slightly better than just approving the republican budget and there will be another budget fight in 3 months that republicans will be more prepared for.
And what is keeping the government shutdown going to do that is different? They would still lose their healthcare!
Do you honestly believe the Republicans were going to cave on this issue?
They were because they need to pay ICE agents etc.
You sure they weren’t still getting paid? This article was from a few weeks ago. Maybe it’s changed since then.
I think raising attention to this issue is the only thing Democrats could hope to accomplish.
They certainly raised attention to how utterly worthless they have always been and always will be.
Haha, good one
That’s a couple of fucking enormous ifs you’re basing your dreams on. In all my days, and I’m very old, a party caving while they had the support of the voters but the minority in Congress has never worked out.
In all your days had a government shutdown ever resulted in anything substantial?
Substantial yes, but not necessarily good. One enabled Reagan to get the Contras funded,one helped Bush lower taxes on the wealthy, another led to Clinton’s reelection…
In general the population has blamed Republicans for causing shutdowns, through history, but Democrats have repeatedly caved on them without attaining their goals.
I sincerely hope this one brings about the end of Schumer’s career.
That won’t happen. Cons will fuck over Americans.
The Dems that caved with this vote had “hope” their Con counterparts would vote the right way.
They didn’t even get real assurances in policy measures!!!
Somebody pointed out last night that it’s no coincidence that it was exactly 8 senators and conveniently none of them are up for reelection in 2026… It’s enough to make one wonder which other senators also need to be primaried even though they flew under the radar.
Only 13 Dem senators are up for re-election in 2026, so I don’t think its that surprising that none of the 8 that voted for this aren’t.
I would say it’s more surprising that
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Any Dems caved at this point before at least seeing how the showdown between Trump and the courts would play out.
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There have been a lot of fingers pointed at Schumer for his lack of leadership in uniting the party. While I think there’s more than enough to criticize him for (being so shitty about Mamdani, especially during the shutdown being the first and foremost thing I would say shows poor leadership), I have to say I’m holding off immediately jumping to that conclusion.
It may be true, and even though I don’t really trust Schumer in many ways, the reason I hesitate to immediately jump on the bandwagon in this case is because of the specific Democrat that was the first to start parroting this narrative, and has continued to parrot it as loudly as possible since last night.
I read this article around midnight last night:
Sunday’s deal was brokered by Democratic Senators Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, both from New Hampshire, and Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, said a person familiar with the talks.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the chamber’s top Democrat, voted against the measure.
Many Democrats on the Hill watched the deal unfold with displeasure.
“Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced,” wrote U.S. Representative Ro Khanna on X. “If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?"
I hesitate to trust Schumer because it seems like he has reached a point in his career where he (along with many establishment Dems) is too quick to sell out core values. However, I do think Schumer honestly may have held those values at one point in his career, but became too comfortable with the status quo.
On the other hand, Ro Kahnna has no values. He was never supposed to be trusted in the first place, and when I see the media refer to him as a progressive it makes my fucking blood boil. He exists to serve the interests of Peter Thiel, and his own interests/Palantir investments, by keeping Thiel rich and happy.
Broken clocks and what not, so he could be right in this instance. However, knowing how Theil uses the media to manipulate public opinion, and this sneaky mother fucking snake in the grass, being the first to already have that narrative ready to go from the jump, and the media being so quick to help him spread it, makes me suspicious as hell.
What reason did those 3 senators possibly have to suddenly cave, and broker that deal on Sunday fucking night after we went into the weekend with the very public back and forth on SNAP?
And then for the other 5 to join them voting for it. It’s clear where Fetterman’s loyalty lies, but the other 7 Democrats that voted for this seriously couldn’t just wait for the public to know that the circuit court sided with the original ruling to pay SNAP in full? Why is that?
Only 13 Dem senators are up for re-election in 2026, so I don’t think its that surprising that none of the 8 that voted for this aren’t.
There are only 48, right? And of those 13 are up for re-election. That’s better than 1 in 4. To look at 8 defectors and none of them be up seems… Highly coincidental at best.
For this to happen by pure chance, that 8 randomly selected people from a group of 48 includes none of the 13 that are up for re-election, the odds are 6.2%. Not impossible but unlikely enough to doubt it’s a coincidence.
(For math people: this can be modeled as a hypergeometric distribution with N=48, K=13, n=8, k=0.)
(For math people: this can be modeled as a hypergeometric distribution with N=48, K=13, n=8, k=0.)
I suspect most people haven’t heard these terms. But they should have studied basic combinatorics in high school, and that’s all it really is. You had a pool of 48 people from whom to choose 8, but you happened to choose them from the specific pool of 35 not up for reelection. So the likelihood of that happening randomly is just 35 choose 8 / 48 choose 8, which is indeed 6.2%.
I would say it’s more surprising that
Any Dems caved at this point before at least seeing how the showdown between Trump and the courts would play out.
Dems caving isn’t surprising in the slightest. Infuriating, sure, but absolutely never surprising.
It’s why I’m so disgusted about the one thing they didn’t cave on.
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It also won’t be a coincidence when they’re seen sailing their new yachts.
They even slipped into the bill that any senator who was investigated by the DOJ under Biden will get a $500k payout from our tax dollars. Schumer and McConnell are probably popping a bottle of champaign together right now.
This was setup no way leadership didn’t know about this. It fucking show and they should pay for this betrayal.
Wasn’t that the point of “Force the Vote”? So we know who the snakes are and they can’t hide behind the assholes who are retiring?
What the fuck was the point of the shutdown if the Dems are just going to capitulate to whatever republicans want? This was their one bit of leverage and they pissed it away.
Yep, with one maneuver, this just became the Dem shutdown. Why were they holding out unless they just wanted to hurt people?
I have an insider secret on government shutdowns. Both sides are in on it, both sides plan it, both side cause it and both sides want it. Oh and super duper secret is that both sides are full of bullshit, and they still get their full salary uninterrupted. And one more thing: all politicians lie. By their own nature or else they would not be in politics or have the desire to get in office.
No, both sides are not the same, but collectively they kind of are. And they all manipulate us to think otherwise.
They may have been “protecting” the filibuster. If Republicans removed the filibuster, it would pave the way for Democrats to do the same thing. If Democrats were to lose the excuse of the Republican filibuster stopping them from passing legislation, they’d be forced to reveal that there are many more fucking disingenuous pieces of shit just like Manchin and Sinema ready to tank progressive legislation.
It’s “oops all manchins” as far as I’m concerned,
I don’t think it’s necessarily all Manchin’s but I wouldn’t be surprised if 30-70% were on a Manchin-like spectrum. I’m pretty sure that when most mainstream Democrats champion anything remotely progressive, they don’t really want it to fully succeed (if at all) and would actually vote against the original legislation as written. The supposed champions are depending on Republicans and the open Manchin’s to negotiate it down to something the champions would actually be willing to vote for.
I remember, years ago, Republicans put some extremely unpopular legislation up for a vote as a performative gesture knowing it would receive zero Democrat votes. Then one or maybe a few Democrats strategically voted in favor, knowing it would be catastrophic for the Republicans approval if they actually passed it in a Republican controlled Congress. Suddenly the remaining Republicans were forced to vote against the bill in order to prevent it from passing. I recall it was considered a very ballsy and impressive move from Democratic leadership.
Without the filibuster, the roles could absolutely be reversed… but the bill would be extremely popular and Republicans could show the true nature of the Democratic party as the Democrats purposely tank it to prevent it from actually passing.
the republicans removed the filibuster the other day to get a bunch of nominations through. It barely made the news.
https://time.com/7316763/nuclear-option-senate-republicans-trump-nominees/
There are more “low stakes” situations where removing the filibuster has been more or less normalized.
Passing the budget is a different beast altogether.
This is paranoid. Reality is not a giant conspiracy when simple explanations exist.
This is the simple explanation. Corrupt individuals in positions of power using their power to engage in more corruption.
What’s ridiculous are the claims that this is some 4D chess move that will reveal some indeterminate major benefit for us at some indeterminate point in the future. That these people are all good with good intentions simply because they belong to a specific private organization, and that if things appear to contradict this, it’s only because we couldn’t possibly understand their big brain moves. Anyone who’s been paying attention can see right through this farce.
How is “corpo dems are corpo” not simple?
I cannot fucking believe it. -Jon Stewart
claimed that they’d ensured a Senate vote on extending the tax credits
Stonewalling the budget was how you could have done that. Fucking lying pieces of shit.
California Governor Gavin Newsom summed the situation up the most succinctly. “Pathetic,” he wrote on X Sunday.
Even Newsom is piling on?
Hey, Gavin’s dad!
He’s a very opportunistic politician, he knows how unpopular the dems are right now, he is carving out his path for '28, but I have very little faith that his almost inevitable presidency will bring us any real change for the people.
For those of you American’s who might want to contact these Senators to give them some feedback:
https://www.cortezmasto.senate.gov/contact/connect/
https://www.fetterman.senate.gov/contact/ https://sengov.com/pennsylvania/john-fetterman/
https://www.kaine.senate.gov/contact
https://www.rosen.senate.gov/email-jacky/
https://www.hassan.senate.gov/contact
https://www.shaheen.senate.gov/contact/contact-jeanne
Only reach out to them if you are actually in their state. When they receive a flood of calls from people around the country, it’s easy for them to write it off and claim they’re just getting brigaded and it’s not something their actual constituents disagree with.
Nah they are supposed to represent the Democratic Party, and they just caved and took some sort of pay out from the Trump administration. So they can kiss my ass and hear what I have to say
Follow the money… I’m betting someone paid them in some form or another.
The money is: Schumer will use the DNC PACs to support their future reelections and prevent them from being primaried later. Sometimes, the money doesn’t have to be some dubious outside entity. It’s just Scumbag Schumer being his normal weak-willed scumbag self.
Everything I have read said these guys aren’t going to run for reelection and are retiring?
I’ve already tried yelling down the empty hallway once. Sleazebag Durbin sent me back a nice form letter thanking me for expressing my opinion. It was the most pointless thing ever. I doubt my words were even read by an intern.
Dems prove once again that they have NO IDEA how to represent the people who voted for them… or even just like, make themselves even slightly likable.
What we’ll never hear is what those eight received in their personal bank accounts. They weren’t so much “holding out” as negotiating.
I have to say, some kind of incentive (monetary or next step of career/legacy) seems like kind of an obvious question, and it’s weird nobody has even pointed that out. Especially if most of these Dems aren’t seeking reelection.
What kind of Democrat betrays her party, and then goes on Fox News of all places to give the details?
Oh man they’re really feeling torn into! I bet they’re sitting in their mansions just racked with guilt and shame over how upset their constituents are! I’m sure they feel just awful for their staffer who has to reply to all the messages they get with a bland, form letter that addresses none of their questions or concerns.
Textbook definition of controlled opposition
Some rambling thoughts:
For all the screeching about 3P leading up to the election, NOW might be the time to drive something like the Working Families Party (that helped elect Zohran) forward and purposefully fragment the Dems at a federal level. What is there to lose? They’re compromised and failing to pose any kind of opposition while Nazis literally control every facet of federal government (and are definitely fucking with elections). Splitting the party would act as a dead man’s switch that puts pressure on the Dems to shift left and form a coalition or officially die as a party.
Realistically, ~3% support would be enough to be a serious threat. Remember that MAGA started with the joke of a tea party
I’m not saying this is a perfect idea, this is just an angry shower thought in response to the Dems. But I wanna know your thoughts, agree or disagree
They’re on the same neoliberal team.
Yeah stop sending money for chuck Schumer to use to fuck everyone. At least Donald trump took donors money and did what he said he was going to do, give to a party you agree with and no longer the so called least bad option. Real progressives need to see the ship sinking and get off now.
Which one of these senators has a primary opponent?
Fucking I hope we all fucking die I hate this shitncountry fuckungshitfucki assbolefuck
Did something happen or do you mean just generally sick of this bullshit?
I am sick of this. It feels like 90% of what we do is lose and we are about to lose a lot thanks to these fucking people.
I hope these fuckinf cowards pay dearly for this shit fuck their worthless fucking lives.
I contacted both of my no vote senators and told them to get their house in order or I will not be donating, progressive or not, to them.
