Trump's extortionist tactics were backfiring – on the Republicans

On Monday, I was angry with the eight Democrats, under Chuck Schumer’s direction, who voted with the GOP to reopen the government. I called them traitors who betrayed their party by surrendering before the fight was over.

This morning, I thought perhaps I was too hard. Then I read Bill Scher’s assessment in the Washington Monthly. Turns out I wasn’t hard enough.

I had surmised that Schumer caved under pressure from the airlines and business interests depending on them. (The FAA had reduced 10 percent of flights, causing thousands of cancellations and more than 10,000 delays as of Sunday.) But Bill, citing the Post’s Karen Tumulty, suggested a worse reason.

It looks like Schumer capitulated because he and others were afraid that Donald Trump and the Republicans would eliminate the filibuster. (To be clear, Bill said this is one of the reasons for his rolling over, not the reason.)

The Democrats had used that 60-vote rule to force the president to bargain over healthcare policy (eg, Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid cuts). Trump refused. Instead, he decided to fire federal workers, steal food stamps and otherwise ramp up public suffering in order to bring the Democrats to heel.

But Trump’s extortionist tactics were backfiring – on the Republicans. Poll after poll blamed them for the pain of the shutdown. Last week’s elections rewarded the Democrats for standing form and trying to bring down costs. Trump, though, would never admit being wrong. So he pestered Senate Republicans into nixing the rule that he saw as the source of his problems.

While there was no serious movement toward abolishing it, just talking about it seems to have given Schumer the chills. “This was all about the filibuster,” Tumulty said on Twitter. When asked if she meant the Democrats hoped that the Republicans would nuke it, she clarified: “They were afraid they would.”

The point of the shutdown, in my view, was never about extracting policy concessions, as the regime is a criminal enterprise that cannot be trusted to honor its agreements. Instead, it was about drawing a bright line between illegitimate rule and legitimate resistance to it. Thanks to the regime’s cruelty, the public seemed to get behind the Democrats in asserting that whatever Trump and the Republicans do with appropriations, it’s on them.

That said, the end of the filibuster would have been a win for the Democrats, no matter how “win” is defined. In time, and with the 60-vote threshold out of the way, the Democrats could achieve previously unimaginable policy goals, including Medicare for all, adding two more states, hence two more senate seats, adding more justices to the Supreme Court, raising the federal minimum wage, reformed housing policy, “Green New Deal,” the list goes on.

That might be why eight Democrats, under Schumer’s direction, caved.

A Senate without the filibuster would expose “moderate” Democrats, forcing them to choose between serving the progressive demands of the base or the status-quo demands of many of the elites. “The world’s greatest deliberative body” would be reshaped by removing the greatest means of rationalizing cowardice. Many Democrats talk a good game about democratic reforms. No filibuster would reveal those who are all talk and who are ready for action.

There are those who would say that ending the filibuster would be as bad for democracy as it is for the squishes in the Senate. Jonathan Bernstein said Tuesday that liberals like me “are dramatically underestimating the damage that Republicans would do over the next 15 months with that constraint removed,” including “election reforms” that so far have been filibustered.

“Essentially, in the middle of a full-on assault by Republicans against the republic, eliminating the filibuster would suddenly give them a powerful new weapon,” Bernstein wrote. “That doesn’t seem sensible to me. At all.”

But if that’s the reason for capitulating, Schumer should say so. He should have added harms done by ending the filibuster to all the harms that were being done by the regime during the shutdown. As David M Perry put it: “Maybe Senate Democrats should say: ‘The Republicans were going to kill people by starving them to death, and because we aren't monsters, we decided to let this fight go. We'll keep fighting. Stop electing monsters.’”

Instead, we got a fantasia of rationales, the most dispiriting being that “standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work,” according to Angus King.

And even if I’m underestimating the damage that could be done by the Republicans without the filibuster, it’s still true that the regime is doing great damage without the Congress. In saying no, the Democrats refused to be complicit in its crimes. In saying yes, they made themselves complicit and made the public task of identifying the “monsters” that much harder to do.

I agree with Bill. Replacing Schumer would not make the Democrats more progressive. But it would send a message. Failure has consequences. Rolling over was a failure. Sadly, only a handful of Democrats in the Congress are calling for his head. The message so far: failure has no consequences and asking a party like that to enact democratic reforms is a fool’s errand.

But getting rid of Schumer would do something else. It would restore some measure of trust among people like me who are deeply skeptical of his real motives. If it’s about protecting the republic and not the status quo, prove it.