WASHINGTON—Amid anger from progressives against defecting Senate Democrats—and against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for not holding them in line—the 43-day government shutdown might come to an end on Nov. 12, or a few days later.
That’s when House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., doing President Donald Trump’s bidding all the way, calls that part of Congress into session after seven weeks of “recess” to vote on a “compromise” money bill to reopen the whole government through Jan. 30, and some agencies beyond that.
That compromise will get only Republican votes and will not rescue the entire country from looming huge increases in health care costs and millions losing healthcare altogether.
“I’m heading back to D.C. to vote NO on this short-term funding bill—because it fails to address the healthcare crisis Republicans created,” said Texas Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett. “House Democrats have been clear from day one: We’re holding the line to make sure that our constituents (and theirs) have access to affordable health care. Our fight is for the people who can’t afford another hit—for the families watching their health care costs skyrocket and wondering how they will make it to next month.”
Her words of warning from late September were replayed in several news reports on Tuesday. “Do not back down. Do not bend,” Crockett said at the time. “If everybody starts to bend, for sure, what is left of our democracy will be gone.”
Not only did Senate Democrats not get their price for voting with Republicans to end the shutdown, but when they tried to add the health care provision—and others—through amendments, they failed every time on party-line votes. The biggest Democratic defections came at the start, to choke off the filibuster, and at the end, on final passage, by 60-40 tallies. The “compromise” passed in the waning hours of Nov. 10.
Crockett and almost every single one of the other Democrats in the House say they will reject Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s demand that the House approve the Senate sellout. And Johnson rubbed salt in the wound by saying there would be no House vote on health care, either, something the Democratic senators who went along with the Republicans were told when they made their “compromise.”
The measure, called a continuing resolution (CR), leaves in place prior law to cut 14 million people off Medicaid over the next decade, at least double Affordable Care Act/Obamacare insurance premiums for 22 million more, starting Jan. 1, and raise insurance premiums—to pay for uncompensated care for people unable to pay their hospital bills—for the rest of us.
The whole sequence, and the harm it will do to millions of people, has caused an uproar among both House members and progressives in the Senate. They say that the “compromise” represents an abandonment by the Democrats of one of the key levers they have in Republican-dominated D.C. That lever is the Senate filibuster, requiring 60 votes to pass a law. The defecting senators gave the GOP the 60 votes they needed to ram through their bill.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, having again proved his ineffectiveness, should resign as party leader. “Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced,” Khanna tweeted on X. “If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., said the election on Nov. 4 “showed is the American people want us to stand up to Trumpism, to stand up to authoritarianism. That is not what happened.”
“This bill doesn’t do anything to arrest the health care catastrophe, nor does it constrain in any meaningful way President Trump’s illegality,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said. “I think the voters were pretty clear on Tuesday night what they wanted Congress to do, and more specifically, what they wanted Democrats to do, and I am really saddened that we didn’t listen to them.”
Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., a former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a member of the Painters union, was even blunter on Twitter/X: “Get Dem senators to negotiate a terrible ‘deal’ that does nothing real about healthcare. Screw over a national political party. Profile of scourge? Next.”
Indivisible.org said it would launch its largest Democratic primary effort ever, targeting the defectors and others, Schumer included. “This is no longer about them. It’s about us,” said co-founder and co-Executive Director Ezra Levin.
“We’re done waiting for Democrats to find their spine. We can’t afford a weak and cowardly Democratic Party while authoritarians invade our cities, terrorize our communities, and threaten our democracy. We intend to demand a Democratic Party that fights.”
“A key faction of Senate Democrats has, once again, shown us they have no fight left in them. They ended this shutdown in exchange for nothing but empty promises from the same Republicans who lied their way into this crisis in the first place, in direct opposition to public sentiment generally, and from Democratic voters specifically,” said co-Executive Director and founder, Leah Greenberg.
“Our democracy is facing an existential threat. We need leaders with backbone and conviction—not timidity and excuses. Democrats can’t defeat authoritarianism by running from the fight. It’s in our hands to make sure those who can’t fight make space for leaders who can. Indivisible is ready to clean house and build a party that actually has the energy to act like an opposition.”
Schumer laid the whole blame on the GOP, which controls Congress and the White House. “The American people have now awoken to Trump’s health care crisis. Health care is once again at the forefront of people’s minds,” Schumer said during the debate.
“People now see premiums are about to skyrocket. They’re terrified about how they’re going to pay for their insurance. Democrats demanded we find a way to fix this crisis and quickly, but Republicans refused to move an inch.
“So I cannot support the Republican bill…because it fails to do anything of substance to fix America’s health care crisis.” But Schumer couldn’t keep his whole bloc of 45 Democrats and two independents together. Seven Democrats and Maine Independent Angus King defected.
Between the 60-40 vote to limit debate on the bill and the identical lineup and vote to approve it, the key vote was on an amendment by Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., to restore all the health care money, undoing the deep cuts the Republican-run Congress approved, on party lines, earlier this year. Her move failed, on party lines, 47-53.
Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., promised a separate vote in December on a stand-alone bill reversing the health care cuts. That “handshake deal is simply not enough,” Baldwin retorted.
Regardless of what happens in the Senate, Johnson has been clear in declaring that he won’t allow a vote on reversing the health care cuts, and even if that somehow succeeded, Trump, the instigator of the cuts, would veto the measure.
Republicans have no problem denying healthcare to millions, but theyare desperately afraid of openly voting to do so as the midterm elections approach.
Sanders went further than criticizing Democratic senators for selling out on this one big bill. He ripped into the Democratic Party’s leadership, in general, which he called “out of touch,” and into what he called “the pathetic bunch of consultants” they rely upon.
“The division we’re seeing in the Democratic Party right now are those who get a whole lot of money from wealthy campaign contributors, they hire consultants, and I gotta tell you that consultant class is so far removed from reality, it is really quite pathetic. That’s one wing of the Democratic Party.
“And then there is the other wing, and that is what Mamdani did in New York. He ran a campaign that said, ‘You know what? We’re gonna take on the oligarchs. And we are going to create a city that is affordable.’ He assembled an extraordinary grassroots movement. Some 90,000 volunteers. Needless to say, I agree with the latter approach, and I think we need candidates all over the country who understand it is insane to have one man, Elon Musk, owning more wealth than the bottom 52 percent of American households. They are candidates who should understand that in the richest country on earth, we can afford health care for everyone.”
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