Who I'm Reading Today

It seems the government shutdown is heading to an end after eight members of the Democratic caucus have broken with their party, and the shutdown deal currently contains some pretty heinous provisions, including an attempt to allow $500k payouts to Senators who participated in Trump's 2020 scheme to replace entire states certified election results with fraudulent ones. Which is absolutely insane corruption the likes of which would be a world-ending scandal under any non-Trump administration but is just par for the course now.

To me, this raises some interesting questions about why and (this second point seems a bit neglected) why now. After all, these the defectors all held the line before. Maybe they were waiting for critical mass, but at least someone changed their mind and could have (but didn't) do so earlier. Well:

1. Being seen to "fight hard" encourages voter turnout among the base, whether or not it accomplishes legislative goals. But now the 2025 election is over, and the 2026 election is a long way off. Even the defectors held off until after the election. They could have coordinated to defect earlier with probably no electoral consequences for them personally (for one thing, most are retiring, and the rest aren't up in 2026), but they didn't.

2. Republicans are in favor of destroying the federal government (even if perma-shutdown isn't their first choice of how) and are willing to inflict unlimited pain on the American people. So they wouldn't necessarily have budged even as Thanksgiving (and so on) was ruined, the economy actually dealt a huge blow, and damage dealt to state capacity that will take decades to repair. (David Brin has a similar take.) The 2025 election results certainly look bad for Republicans, but 2026 was already looking pretty bad for them, and making it look slightly worse for them doesn't necessarily make them more inclined to compromise. They also have primary elections to consider and their own base that doesn't want them to budge.

3. Even if House and Senate Republicans blinked, Trump alone is sufficient to hold the "House CR or nothing" line, they wouldn't have a veto-proof majority. Trump was already pushing Senate to abolish the filibuster and push through the House bill. Of course, abolishing the filibuster is something that Conservadems would hate. It would remove any reason for Republicans to negotiate with them now, or for a slim majority of actual liberals (if that ever happens) to negotiate with them later.

4. On the other hand, as sort of a alternative to that first point, it's possible that the defectors saw Mamdani win and regretted holding out until the election in the first place.