--:-- Michael Barbaro: From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the story of how a small group of Senate Democrats broke from their colleagues, struck a deal with Republicans to end the government shutdown, and touched off the latest civil war inside their party.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: I spoke with my colleagues, congressional reporter Katie Edmondson and national political correspondent Shane Goldmacher.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Thank you, Michael. I just want to explain that we're talking to you on Monday afternoon after a head-spinning few days of news that could keep changing after we talk to you.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And the reason the past few days have been head-spinning is that from the outside, it looked like Democrats were riding really high after last Tuesday's election, which seemed to ratify their strategy of keeping the federal government shut down as a way of forcing Republicans and President Trump to reckon with these sky-high health care costs.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: In fact, it seemed to be working so well that in the aftermath of that election, Trump declared that the shutdown was being blamed on Republicans and was helping Democrats. He articulated that idea.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And then Democrats tossed this entire seemingly winning strategy out of the window. I didn't see that coming.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Well, I think it gave a lot of people a real sense of whiplash, Michael, because, as you said, I remember standing outside of Democrats' closed-door meeting on Wednesday, and they came out sounding thrilled by what voters had just done in New Jersey, New York, Virginia, which is to show overwhelmingly that they sided with the Democratic agenda here, which was focused on lowering costs specifically.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And so we heard from a lot of Democrats, particularly progressive Democrats, that, look, voters have just vindicated what our strategy is and they're telling us they want us to keep up the fight.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: But I think what was always brewing under the surface, Michael, was that there was this small clutch of centrist Democrats who have grown really uncomfortable with all of the pain points that have emerged of the shutdown who are looking for some sort of off ramp.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Right. A clutch of Democrats who did not believe that the shutdown was the height of Democratic success.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: So tell us who these senators are and what they started to do.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Well, a lot of these senators hail from kind of purple or reddish states. A lot of these are senators who really pride themselves on having some sort of bipartisan credentials to their name, pride themselves on working across the aisle.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And we're talking about the senators from New Hampshire, Senator June Shaheen and Maggie Hassan. We're talking about the senators from Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jackie Rosen.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Angus King of Maine, he's actually an independent, but he caucuses with Democrats. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, of course, someone who frequently finds himself breaking with Democrats these days.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: We're talking about Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. And finally and importantly, there's Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, who's actually the number two Democrat.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: He is the party's whip who will not be running for reelection at the end of his term.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And I think one of the conclusions that they all ended up coming to together is that the chief demand that their party had been asking for, which is for Republicans to vote to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year, was not going to happen.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: It was not in the cards.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And what made them so sure of that?
--:-- Katie Edmondson: With Republicans starting to openly acknowledge that the shutdown was going well for Democrats, that meant them acknowledging that the health care issue was not going well for them.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And what furthermore made these Senate Democrats comfortable with the idea of giving up on the central rationale for shutting down the government in the first place, health care?
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Well, I think most of them saw the writing on the wall, saw the refusal of President Trump to negotiate, saw the refusal of Speaker Mike Johnson over in the House to even commit to holding a vote on the issue.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And then on the other side of the coin, they saw all of the pain that has been inflicted on American voters ever since the shutdown began.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And I think the conclusion that they came to was, yes, extending these subsidies is extremely important. It's a fight worth having. However, we don't see an endgame here, and it is now coming at the expense of a lot of working people.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And so they begin these quiet discussions amongst themselves, but also with centrist Republicans in the Senate to try to see, is there some sort of deal we can broker here that can give us an acceptable off ramp so that we can vote to reopen the government and end the shutdown?
--:-- Michael Barbaro: And what kind of negotiation does this clutch of moderate Senate Democrats enter into with Republicans knowing that health care is off the table?
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Well, these negotiations essentially center on spending bills, right? Funding bills to reopen the government.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: But what they ultimately really become centered around are these measures that Democrats are pushing for in order to rein in some of the actions taken by the Trump administration during the shutdown and also to protect some of the programs that the White House sought to weaponize during that funding lapse.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Such as?
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Some of the big provisions here include a measure saying all of the workers who were fired or laid off during the shutdown have to be returned to their jobs.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Michael, you'll remember that President Trump has hinted repeatedly during the shutdown that maybe he would not give back pay to federal workers who were furloughed during the shutdown.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: So they include a provision that says the federal government will repay federal workers for the paychecks that they missed and we're providing you with the money to do it right here in this bill.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Gotcha.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And this gets kind of wonky, but they move to protect this independent agency called the Government Accountability Office.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And this is a government agency that essentially is a watchdog for how the White House handles the funds that Congress appropriates.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: This is an agency that has blown the whistle on the White House seven times alone this year, saying that the White House has illegally handled money that Congress appropriated.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And this is an agency that actually has the power to sue the White House over impoundment or when the White House refuses to release funds that Congress has appropriated.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And so House Republicans had pushed to essentially gut the budget of that agency and to also revoke its power to sue the White House.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And so in these negotiations, the senators say, if you want our vote to reopen the government, you need to make sure that this agency is safe, essentially, that it has the budget that it needs and it retains all of the powers that it currently has in order to sue the White House.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Fascinating.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And on health care, of course, the senators know that they cannot get a guarantee on a vote, but they do get this promise from Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, that he will hold a vote later in December, an up or down vote on whether or not Republicans will extend the ACA tax subsidies.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: So in short these Democrats negotiate a deal that pretty much undoes a lot of the damage from the shutdown and preserves this government accountability office that matters to them as an institution that keeps the president in check.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And finally, and it seems somewhat significantly, they get what they see as an ironclad promise that Senate Republicans will vote on renewing Affordable Care Act subsidies, which perhaps they don't think Republicans will, but that would put Republicans on record as not doing it.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: That's right.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: What they want, Michael, is exactly that. They want to put every single Senate Republican on the record on this issue.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: And so all of the details of exactly what they had secured started trickling out on Sunday evening.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: I was sitting up at the Capitol, and lo and behold, the Senate Appropriations Committee starts putting out legislative text that actually contains the details of these policy wins that Democrats had secured.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And so I'm kind of tearing through these bills, right, trying to read exactly what's in them.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And it becomes very clear the more that you read that it seems like there's really a deal here.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: I think we just have to explain this, Katie, because most of us imagine that Congress is this very top-down place where decisions come from upon high.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: But what you're describing is a handful of Senate Democrats a little bit going seemingly rogue and reaching a deal to try to end the shutdown with Republicans.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And the leadership of the Senate Democrats is not really involved.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Well, I'm really glad that you brought this up, Michael.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: I mean, that is completely right. Typically, and especially in the past couple of years, Congress has been a very top-down institution.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: What we saw here really was a return to sort of a style of legislating that was more common maybe six years ago, 10 years ago.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: These were the so-called gangs that senators really prided themselves on being a part of, right?
--:-- Katie Edmondson: It was the idea that me and my Democratic friends are going to sit down in a closed door room with you and your five Republican friends, and we're going to hammer this out amongst ourselves.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And that's really what we saw here.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And I think it's one of the reasons why, again, their sudden declaration that they had a deal really did surprise a lot of people.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: And Michael, the other surprising thing about the Senate is that even though it is known for being such a slow moving institution, it can really move quickly when its leaders want it to.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And so it was really not long after these centrist Democrats declared that they had the votes for a compromise to reopen the government, that we saw that compromise be put to a vote on the Senate floor.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And I think this was the moment that the vast majority of us, myself included, got clued in on Sunday night, just in time for a news conference in which this small group of Democrats goes up to the microphone and tries to explain why they're doing what they're doing and why, in a sense, they have gone around the rest of their Democratic colleagues.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Today, the Senate voted to start reopening the government.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: So shortly after casting their votes, this clutch of Democrats holds a news conference right off the Senate floor.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: We took a big step forward to protect the health care of tens of millions of Americans in exchange for funding through January 31st.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And they talk about how important they believe extending these health care subsidies is.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: With the government reopened, we must move quickly to deliver on that promise and to keep health care premiums affordable.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: But mostly they talk about the pain that people are experiencing in a shutdown.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: We were seeing lines to our food banks in northern Nevada.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: These were lines that I hadn't seen since the pandemic.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: You have senators talking about SNAP recipients, right, who are going hungry.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: We have TSA agents.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: We have airport controllers.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: You hear about the federal workers who have gone for weeks without a paycheck.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: This agreement ensures that law enforcement, air traffic controllers and other federal workers get paid.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And one by one, it just becomes very clear that for these senators, continuing on with this shutdown was simply not tenable.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: This was the only deal on the table.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: It was our best chance to reopen the government and immediately begin negotiations to extend the ACA tax credits that tens of millions of Americans rely on to keep costs down.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Thank you all.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Thank you.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: And yet, as we could tell from what was happening on the floor of the Senate on Sunday night, the vast majority of their Democratic colleagues disagree with them.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: That's right.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: At least that's how they voted.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: There were exactly eight Democrats who voted for this deal to reopen the government.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And, Michael, that was the magic number of Democrats needed in order for this deal to advance.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Which means that the entire rest of the Democratic caucus voted no.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Not only did they vote no, a lot of them were pretty vocal in saying how frustrated they were by this decision made by some of their colleagues.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Tonight, what this Senate is about to do is make a horrific situation even worse.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And you heard this frustration coming from a wide swath of the Democratic caucus.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: If this vote succeeds, over 20 million Americans are going to see at least a doubling in their premiums in the affordable care.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: But you also heard similar noises being made by people like Senator Alyssa Slotkin, who I think of as being a pretty moderate Democrat from Michigan, who said that she simply couldn't lend her vote to this effort because there was no real health care deal on the table.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And that's what she wanted for the American people.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: The Democratic leader, Mr. President, America is in the midst of a Republican made health care crisis.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And even Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who is the leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus, says that he is going to oppose this deal that was brokered by some of his own members.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And he says, this health care crisis is so severe, so urgent, so devastating for families back home that I cannot in good faith support this.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: That fails to address the health care crisis.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Now, Michael, it was really only minutes after these centrist Democrats made their declaration that they were ready to vote to reopen the government that Democrats on Capitol Hill were already hearing from their voters all across the country.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Actually, as I was standing outside of that closed-door meeting, I looked over at a senior Democratic aide who was scrolling on his phone, and his face was—he kind of just had a funny look on his face.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: He was almost a little ashen.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And I said, well, what's going on?
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And he said, oh, I'm just looking at the reactions to this on social media.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And what he was seeing is what I think we've all seen.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: What, if anything, did Democrats get out of a 40-plus days of a shutdown?
--:-- Katie Edmondson: They didn't get anything.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: This is the same deal that Senator John Thune said.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: On social media, on cable news.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: It is unconscionable, unconscionable.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: And this emotionally charged explosion within the Democratic Party.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Like, why are we acting as if Democrats just lost the election?
--:-- Katie Edmondson: Democrats had overwhelming victories.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: I don't understand how a Democratic senator goes, wow, we won really big. Let me cave now.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: I don't understand what these people in Washington think they're doing representing the people who they claim to represent.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: That I think has resurrected a lot of the sort of fierce debates that are happening internally within the party when it comes to how should Democrats position themselves in this moment.
--:-- Katie Edmondson: How can Democrats best fight back against the Trump administration?
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Well, Katie, thank you very much.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Thank you, Michael.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: The last time you were in the studio...
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Less than one week ago.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Less than one week ago, election night, and you came on to observe what an extraordinary moment of triumph it was for Democrats.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And now, less than a week later, the Democrats are screaming at each other.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And resounding victory at the polls has yielded to claims, as Katie just said, of capitulation, betrayal, caving.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: What a difference a week makes.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: The term that has come up as I've talked to Democratic strategists has been that this feels like a self-own for the Democratic Party.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That the Democratic Party had been riding high after a rough week for Donald Trump.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And here, starting this next week, they decided this was the moment to give up a fight that the party's base had been craving and one that they seemingly had been winning, at least politically.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: I want you to answer, to the best of your ability, this very simple question.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Taken in its totality, if we assume this shutdown is going to soon be over, was this a good experience for the Democrats or a bad one?
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Let's start with the good.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: The good is that the Democratic Party has clearly elevated two issues that it feels are the winning issues for the party.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: The first is health care.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And the second is affordability told through health care.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And those have been the dominant topic of conversation for weeks, which is pretty hard to pull off when you're the minority party with no power in Washington.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And it took a shutdown for them to do that and for them to elevate those issues in hopes that long past the shutdown, voters will think, oh, that's the party that's actually fighting for me on those issues.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Right.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: So that's one side of the ledger, the good side.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That's the good side.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: But the risk of that fight was inflating people's expectations that they were actually going to win something on those issues.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Right.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: They had to say we're fighting for this because we want X, Y, Z outcomes.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And they didn't get those outcomes.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: They've got the promise of a vote, which is not guaranteed to pass.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Right, someone called it a pinky promise.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: A pinky promise.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And so the bad is that the timing of this shutdown ending is coming just as the Democratic Party was actually starting to feel some rare momentum in the Trump era.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That's exactly when the Democrats chose to cave, seemingly when things were going great.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And so this decision to cave at this moment is unleashing the anger and energy that has been urban beneath the surface for months.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Which is the Democrats are angry at their own party.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And they have been all year.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: They have been basically since Kamala Harris lost.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And the shutdown was this sort of notable little reprieve where Democrats kind of stopped hating Democrats for a little while.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: I mean, there was a Quinnipiac poll over the summer that showed that Democratic approval rating of Democrats in Congress was at 39%.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That's a really bad stat.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And that same pollster took a poll in October and it had jumped 20 percentage points to 58%.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Not great, right?
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: People aren't suddenly in love.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: It's a big increase.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: I'll be really interested to see what those numbers look like now that that bubble of hope had been inflated and deflated in this shutdown.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Well, talk about the consequences of having created this hope bubble, this idea that the shutdown was going to lead to meaningful changes in the country's healthcare system, which we don't think they are, and in a broader sense would show that Democrats were willing to really take on the president, which they were until they weren't.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: I mean, this was always the risk of entering the shutdown, right?
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Chuck Schumer was very clear about why they should have this shutdown, what they were fighting for, but there wasn't an endgame to get out of it with a win on policy.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And so you were always going to have this ugly ending, as people have described it to me, that the fear of how it was going to end was going to be bad, even if in all these unlikely ways they were actually doing okay in public polling about the issue.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And so who actually voted to end the shutdown, I think, is really revealing.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And the people who voted to actually end the shutdown are the people furthest removed from facing any real backlash because none of those eight Democratic senators, Democratic-aligned senators, are on the ballot next year.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Hmm.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: They're all either retiring or on the ballot in 2028 or 2030.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: The Senate has these staggered terms, and this is something you can do in Washington.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Try to keep your most vulnerable people out of having to cast the toughest votes.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Interesting.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: You're saying that the Democrats, to the degree that this is any kind of organized strategy, which I guess we're not entirely sure, put the safest Democratic senators furthest from election out to do the quote-unquote dirty work here of reopening the government without fulfilling the promise of improving health care.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Yes.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: So I think the yes votes here are really revealing.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: But there's one no vote that I found especially interesting.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Who?
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: John Ossoff.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: He is the most vulnerable senator up for election next year.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: So he will face the voters.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And he's running in Georgia and really focused on his general election, right?
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: No one's running against him in the primary right now.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And what the no vote here says is that he doesn't want to risk backlash from inside his own party in this campaign.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Whether that's from a potential primary challenger who could get recruited from one of these angry groups, or whether it's the small donors who are fueling his campaign deciding, you know what, maybe we're not so into John Ossoff.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: He doesn't want to risk backlash.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That's fascinating because as you're suggesting, John Ossoff could reasonably be most focused on a Republican opponent in a general election saying, you should have voted to reopen the government.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That's what matters in this race.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And instead, what you're saying is he's more worried about upsetting Democrats in a potential primary.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And that's what animated his vote on the shutdown.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And in the end, he votes to keep the government shut down because he wants to look like he's on the side of the Democratic base.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That's what we think happened here.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Yeah, I have not talked to Senator Ossoff here.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: But what you can see is that there are two choices.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Choice one is vote to reopen the government and say, I'm going to buck my party and I'm going to reopen the government even if people on my left attack me for it.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Right.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That's a selling point in a lot of places.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Right.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And so here's a Democrat saying, you know, that's not the right calculus here.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: To the extent he's making a politically motivated choice.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: The right calculus is to make sure that your own party likes you and supports you and sees you as a fighter because you want that energy behind you in a coming midterm election
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: I noticed as well that several of the Democrats hoping to be the next presidential nominee woke up this morning on Monday and decided that this was a terrible decision.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: I think a lot of them decided last night they didn't even wait.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: You know, like, they started issuing these statements on Sunday.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: You saw it from Gavin Newsom, who said, just as it was done, that America deserves better.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: You saw it from Chris Murphy, who's in the Senate.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: You can see how tired I am.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: I've been here all weekend.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: I've been working throughout the past few weeks to try to prevent this moment.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: He said, we could have won this fight.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: We gave up too early.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: There's no way to defend this.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And you are right to be angry about it.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: I'm angry about it.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: You saw it from Ro Khanna.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Can we recover?
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Yes.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: I think that the first step to recovering is to have generational change and new leadership.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: A congressman from California who said Schumer, it's time for him to go.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: He is not meeting the moment.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: He's out of touch with where the party's base is.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: If you are thinking or planning to run for president as a Democrat in 2028, You've basically denounced this deal.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Well, Shane, since Ro Khanna brought Chuck Schumer up, let's talk about his place in all of this.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: There's a fair bit of anger being directed at him today as we're speaking.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Yet he's the one who brought the Democrats into the shutdown.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: He helped create the strategy.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: He is the architect of now what has been the longest shutdown in history and the architect of fighting on these particular issues.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Right.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Saying these are something that we can fight for now and win on later.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Elevate this for voters.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Make them think about affordability.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Make them think about health care.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: He created the message.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: He's kept them on the message.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And he kept his conference together for 40 days.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: So why are people mad at him?
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Because he's the leader, right?
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: The frustration is Chuck Schumer, if he was really the leader, would keep his party in line until he decided.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: The fact that he didn't vote with them, sure, that means he's not supporting ending the shutdown right now.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: But he's not actually leading and keeping them in line sufficiently to have the fight that they want to have.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Got it.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: So I just want to observe where we are.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And it's a really interesting place.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Democrats who want to be president are railing against this deal that was achieved by fellow Democrats.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That's how much they want a fight right now against President Trump.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Senators like John Ossoff, in a very purple place, they're fighting this deal to end the shutdown the way that it's probably going to be ending.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That's how much he wants a fight against President Trump right now.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: The majority of Senate Democrats are voting against this deal struck by their own fellow Democrats.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That's how much the whole party wants to be fighting President Trump right now as a kind of a brand message.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And that brings me back to what our colleague, Karl Hulse, said to me the night that the shutdown began 40-something days ago.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: He argued that the Trump era has fundamentally changed the Democratic Party.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: In a sense, it's radicalized it.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And the party wants to say as loudly as possible, we are not the Democratic Party of those eight moderates who did this deal.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That's not who we are.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: We exist to fight President Trump.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And if that means we have to fight ourselves in a kind of civil war, if that means we're going to take out our anger at our own Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, so be it.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: We will be the party of fighting Trump, period.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: One of the defining forces for Democrats in Trump's second term is that voters are angry at their own party.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And I think that's part of what gets us into the shutdown.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: It's part of why they're going to be disappointed by the results of the shutdown.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And we're going to see what that looks like next year.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: That anger, that energy, that has worked for parties before to take back power.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And so I think Democrats are trying to tread carefully here.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: They want to keep the voters angry, but they would like to direct the anger at the other party.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: At the moment, it's being directed internally.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And that's getting back to that self-owned moment, right?
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Which is last week you saw angry voters turn out and vote out Republicans all across the country.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And the concern is what if we've turned that anger back at us now?
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And as quickly as possible, they're going to try to harness that energy, that anger, that frustration and say, we fought the good fight here.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: You wanted us to fight.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: We did the fight.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And even if we didn't get everything we wanted, we showed you that we can and would.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: And that the details of how this ended are going to be forgotten far sooner than the fact that they had the fight in the first place.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: In other words, the message now is, don't worry about the way this ended.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Just be glad it even happened.
--:-- Shane Goldmacher: Just remember the fight we had.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Well, Shane, thank you very much.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Thank you.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: On Monday night, the Senate approved a package of spending bills backed by the eight Senate Democrats and every Senate Republican that would end the government shutdown.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Those bills now head to the Republican-controlled House, which is expected to adopt them later this week.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: If that happens, the government will reopen by the end of the week.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: We'll be right back.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Here's what else you need to know today.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: At the Supreme Court on Monday, the justices denied a request that they consider overturning the court's landmark 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: The decision was closely watched by gay Americans and their allies, who feared that the court's conservative majority might reverse the gay marriage ruling in the same way that they eliminated the nationwide right to an abortion.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: But the high court agreed that it would hear a case challenging mail-in ballot rules across the country.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: The case revolves around Mississippi's five-day grace period, which allows election officials to count ballots that have been mailed on election day, but arrive a few days later.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Dozens of states have similar grace periods as Mississippi's, so if the court finds that Mississippi's rules are illegal, it could create chaos leading up to the 2026 elections.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: Today's episode was produced by Claire Tennesketter and Anna Foley.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: It was edited by Rachel Quester and Patricia Willans, contains music by Rowan Emisto, Dan Powell, and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.
--:-- Michael Barbaro: That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.
