Breaking Down The Deal To End The Government Shutdown

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Speaker 3 Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks.
I cover voting.

Speaker 5 I'm Claudia De Sales. I cover Congress.

Speaker 4 And I'm Domenico Montanero, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.

Speaker 3 And today on the show, the government shutdown is one step closer to ending.

Speaker 3 Last night, a group of Senate Democrats broke with our leadership and voted to move a plan forward that would fund the government.

Speaker 3 Claudia, what is in this agreement that the Senate reached last night?

Speaker 5 Well, it includes a stopgap measure that'll fund the government through the end of January.

Speaker 5 And separately, it also includes full-year bipartisan appropriations funding plans for some federal agencies and services. This goes through the end of the fiscal year, end of September of 2026.

Speaker 5 These have been negotiated by both parties for months.

Speaker 5 Some of the specifics we heard Democrats tout with this plan is that it includes an effort to reverse federal worker layoffs that we saw during the shutdown, creates new protections from these layoffs through January, potentially to the end of the fiscal year as well.

Speaker 5 And it also pauses planned cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP.

Speaker 5 And Democrats said as part of this deal, the ones who defected said they got a promise on a vote on health care.

Speaker 5 And as you remember, the party fought to address expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies that are spiking premiums, but that didn't happen.

Speaker 3 Okay, so nothing on Congress is super simple. What are the next steps here and how likely are we actually to see the longest government shutdown in history end?

Speaker 5 Right. Well, if Republican leaders have their way, they'd like to get it all done this week.

Speaker 5 They're racing now in the Senate to get through several votes before they can pass this package on to the House.

Speaker 5 Speaker Mike Johnson said he'd like his chamber to take this up as early as Wednesday, so aiming to get this to the president by week's end. So it's a pretty aggressive timeline.

Speaker 5 Maybe we could see business as usual resume maybe by the weekend, beginning of next week. And Republicans really have an initiative here to get this done.

Speaker 5 They've looked ineffective, irrelevant, powerless during this time, and they want to change this narrative and get back to the business of making laws.

Speaker 3 Well, it's so interesting. I mean, this deal comes from this group of Democrats making this decision.
And Domenico, I'm curious for your take on why this is happening now.

Speaker 3 They did not get what they said they wanted, which was a promise from Republicans to extend health care subsidies subsidies related to the Affordable Care Act, they didn't get that.

Speaker 3 They got basically a promise to vote on that. So, I mean, why has this group of senators, do you think, decided to change their tune now?

Speaker 4 Aaron Powell, well, in the end, Republicans were right that there were a handful of Democrats who couldn't take the pain. You know, the SNAP benefits being cut, federal worker furloughs and layoffs.

Speaker 4 There were, you know, a group of moderate senators who thought this was just too much, that the real world consequences of it were too great and that they they needed to stop it.

Speaker 4 I mean, we've started to see airport delays piling up, all kinds of consequences for regular people of the federal government not being open.

Speaker 4 But, you know, frankly, Democrats should have seen this coming from the beginning.

Speaker 4 It's really hard to be able to have a negotiation with the other side when the other side thinks government is the problem, when you want government to work more efficiently and the other side doesn't care about it.

Speaker 4 You know, that makes it really, really hard. You already put yourself yourself in a fight with your hands behind your back.

Speaker 5 Yeah, Republicans were correct in saying the easiest way out of this was to see five Senate Democrats join three who have already been voting with Republicans to get this stopgap measure moving.

Speaker 5 And so that's exactly what we saw. We saw these five additional Democrats join these three other members to get this done.

Speaker 3 Well, let's dig into that a little bit, Claudia. Who are these senators who have kind of broken ranks with Democratic leadership and voted to reopen the government?

Speaker 5 Well, they're largely moderates and they can take these kind of political risks. There's a few retiring senators in here.

Speaker 5 Now, in terms of those who were already voting with Republicans, there were two Democrats, Catherine Cortez-Masto and John Fetterman, who had joined with Maine Independent Senator Angus King.

Speaker 5 And I should note, John Fetterman is a senator from Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez-Masto from Nevada. And so five more joined them.
And Jean Shaheen of New Hampshire is the one who led these talks.

Speaker 5 I should note they were pretty secretive. It was hard for us to get a list of names of who was involved.

Speaker 5 Some senators dropped in, some dropped out, but the final list was this eight who could afford this risk and protect other senators who might be facing tough reelections coming up next year.

Speaker 5 Shaheen, for example, is a retiring New Hampshire senator.

Speaker 5 She's a top Democrat on Senate Armed Services Foreign Relations, and her counterpart, Maggie Hassen, in New Hampshire, joined her to vote for the next step for this deal to move forward.

Speaker 5 We also saw Jackie Rosen in Nevada vote with Catherine Cortez-Masto and Virginia's Tim Kaine. He was working on protections for federal workers, and finally, Illinois' Dick Durbin.

Speaker 5 He's another retiring senator.

Speaker 3 Domenico, anyone in that list surprise you or any thoughts on that list?

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, it does look like a group of senators who certainly could afford to take whatever the political hit is that comes.

Speaker 4 I mean, Tim Kaine won re-election last year, so he's not up till 2030, you know, and aside from that, as Claudia mentioned, you know, several of these are not even coming back, right?

Speaker 4 And then you have people, you know, like

Speaker 4 Catherine Cortez-Masto and John Fetterman, who had been voting this way all along, are from swing states, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Speaker 4 So I think that that's why you see a list like this, where you have people who are able to kind of absorb that.

Speaker 4 And I kind of wonder what the behind the scenes were on this, because I think there's going to be huge pressure now on the leadership of Chuck Schumer and whether or not he's somebody who can continue to lead this caucus going forward, considering he voted no on this.

Speaker 4 On its face, it looked like they crossed him. You know, he's the Democratic minority leader in the Senate right now.
But

Speaker 4 how much of this was Schumer allowing this kind of group of senators to go ahead and make this vote because

Speaker 4 they can absorb that.

Speaker 3 All right, we're going to take a quick break and more on all of this in just a minute.

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Speaker 3 And we're back. We're talking about a deal to end the government shutdown.
Claudia, if this deal does end up passing the Senate, what is likely to happen in the House?

Speaker 5 Well, we're expecting House Republicans to try to pass this rather quickly. We've seen this movie many times before.

Speaker 5 If the president wants to see a deal passed out of the House, Republicans generally follow suit. They may lose a handful or less of...

Speaker 5 their members of the conference. It's possible.
And even though most House Democrats are furious about this deal, we could see some defect in that case as well to get get this across the finish line.

Speaker 5 So right now, the House is really, really anxious to get this done because they've been out for about 50 days. And this kind of adds to this perception that they are not working.
They are irrelevant.

Speaker 5 They've lost their power. And so they're hoping to get that behind them.

Speaker 3 And this is, we should note, a really big deal for people who receive snap food benefits, for instance, anyone who is planning to travel over the next couple of weeks around Thanksgiving.

Speaker 3 But when it comes to the politics, Domenico, is this a win or a loss for Democrats because they did not get what they said they were

Speaker 3 going to hold out for?

Speaker 4 Right. I mean, on its face, I mean, the end of the longest government shutdown in U.S.
history is the result of a major Democratic capitulation.

Speaker 4 But at the end of the day, it might not be all that bad for Democrats.

Speaker 4 They get to look like the adults who care and took the high road less than a week after sweeping off-year election victories across the country.

Speaker 4 And if Republicans do vote against health care subsidy extensions in December, you know, when that's been promised as part of the shutdown deal that's tentatively in place here, the Republicans will then fully own health care as a problem.

Speaker 4 You know, as it is, Democrats have the wind at their backs on health care as an issue. They'll be happy to run on that and the cost of living in next year's midterms, as we've been talking about.

Speaker 4 They're going to have a lot of work to do, though, to keep progressives on side after what many of them are viewing as the latest show of weakness from a party really defined by it right now as they see it.

Speaker 4 So I think that's going to be the Democrats' biggest challenge in being able to keep this momentum to be able to win in next year's midterm elections.

Speaker 3 That's so interesting.

Speaker 3 I mean, I could totally see how if health care prices do spike as they're expected to do for many Americans, that might have been an in-the-weeds issue or something that they could have argued about.

Speaker 3 But now basically what you're saying is that Democrats have the ability to really put that on Republicans, even if they didn't actually get an answer to the problem out of the shutdown.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's part of why a lot of Democrats, a majority of Democrats, as you're seeing, are not going going along with this because they felt like they had health care as an issue that was continuing to help them through this shutdown.

Speaker 4 And they thought at some point Republicans would have to bend a little bit and maybe try to get these extensions for people.

Speaker 4 But obviously these eight Democrats and those who caucused with Democrats, including Angus King, felt like this was not a winning strategy, that Republicans were not going to bend, and that they had to overlook the politics of this because of the real-life consequences for a lot of people, including a lot of their constituents.

Speaker 5 And we also heard from Shaheen, who said, look, this is not the deal everyone wanted, but we're going to get another opportunity in January.

Speaker 5 Democrats clearly illustrated that they're not going to be steamrolled automatically as they were when we saw the last shutdown threat earlier this year.

Speaker 5 They folded very quickly before if shutdown even started.

Speaker 5 So in this case, Democrats think they've gained a lot of leverage and they think they can use it again in January if things do not go as they're hoping they will.

Speaker 4 You know, I think that there's a lot of truth to that, right?

Speaker 4 Because back in March, when Chuck Schumer decided to go along with keeping the government open because of the potential consequences that he foresaw, there was a huge backlash from progressives.

Speaker 4 And, you know, while you could, you know, cynically say that Schumer's just doing this for politics, what progressives will take from this is that they were able to be able to leverage Democratic senators to show more fight and that they can, you know, clear the brush of a lot of these senators who are retiring or up for re-election.

Speaker 4 And the ones in blue states are ones that they can primary and have more senators in Congress and, you know, who are up for the fight, frankly.

Speaker 3 I mean, I do wonder about the future of Chuck Schumer as Democratic minority leader, though. I mean,

Speaker 3 the progressives are not happy, even with this, you know, how long Democrats did stay united on this shutdown. So I guess I wonder, Claudia, what the future of Senator Schumer as leader is.

Speaker 5 Schumer, for his case, keeps playing into this role that is upsetting these progressives.

Speaker 5 And another senator I saw last night, Elizabeth Warren, after they left, they had an hour-long meeting before this vote came down.

Speaker 5 When she was asked about Schumer, she took a very long pause and then she said, the American people expect us to fight for health care. And obviously, we're not doing that.

Speaker 5 So it just signals the kind of headwinds that Schumer is going to face. What is the end of this? Can he hold on to his post once again?

Speaker 5 I mean, this is building up from the year, from folding earlier this year for that shutdown threat, from not directly endorsing a New York mayoral candidate early on.

Speaker 5 All of that's building against him, but it's possible he could survive. We just don't know at the moment.

Speaker 3 Well, I want to look ahead a little bit.

Speaker 3 Assuming that this deal does end up passing and that the shutdown does end shortly, the legacy of this shutdown, you know, we are a year out from midterms.

Speaker 3 Do you both think that this shutdown will have an impact on how voters feel about either party when they go to vote next year?

Speaker 5 I think voters have pretty short-term memory.

Speaker 5 So by this time next year, I think they're going to be worrying about the same issues that are pressing them today, day-to-day issues in terms of how much groceries cost, how much is gas costing me now, why am I seeing prices rise here and there?

Speaker 5 How is this changing my life, this administration at this moment? So it's possible this could be a faint memory.

Speaker 5 As for kind of the backlash that could hit certain senators like Schumer and others, that remains to be seen.

Speaker 4 You know, I really think that it tells us more about the kind of evolution we've seen of both parties.

Speaker 4 You know, you've had the Republican Party for a long time being a party that, particularly since the rise of the Tea Party, has been far less willing to compromise than Democrats.

Speaker 4 We've seen that through lots of different kinds of fights, whether it was, you know, fiscal cliff negotiations during the Obama administration to the shutdown during the Trump administration the first time around to now the longest shutdown in U.S.

Speaker 4 history over 40 days here.

Speaker 4 And I think it's telling you that also Democrats now are moving to a position where they need to feel like they are antagonists and that they are going to fight Republicans because they don't see a path forward for compromise.

Speaker 4 And for a system that's built on compromise and checks and balances, when you have two sides that are not going to compromise, then that really gums up the works.

Speaker 3 That's like two different messages, though, right?

Speaker 3 You're getting that message from the shutdown that Democrats want fighters, but then we're seeing the results from Virginia and New Jersey, which says like maybe Democrats are thinking about running more centrist, more moderate candidates, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, I don't know which does the party end up going with next year.

Speaker 4 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: You know, I don't think that centrist or moderate is necessarily at odds with pugilistic. I think that there's just a difference in what you're fighting for.

Speaker 4 I think that a lot of the pragmatic Democrats will say that the Republican Party has gone so far to the right that you can't even negotiate or compromise on things that have majority support.

Speaker 4 And if that's the case, then they want 50 plus one to be able to fight for what they feel like are positions that a majority of the people believe in.

Speaker 3 All right, well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Miles Parks, I cover voting.

Speaker 5 I'm Claudia Resales, I cover Congress.

Speaker 4 And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

Speaker 3 And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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