Tensions in the Democratic Party are boiling over this week after a group of mostly moderate Democratic senators joined Republicans to advance a bill to reopen the government.
The Democrats’ support for the spending bill all but ensures that the history-making shutdown will soon end, but it came without Republicans giving any ground on the Democrats’ central demand for an extension of ObamaCare subsidies.
The stunning development Sunday night has infuriated liberals in and out of Congress, who had cheered Democrats throughout the weeks-long shutdown and urged them to keep up the fight for the sake of preventing health care costs from skyrocketing at the beginning of next year.
After a small group of Democrats defied those calls, providing the votes needed to surpass their own party’s filibuster, liberals fumed that the centrists gave away the store without anything in return. The frustrations were only fueled by the results of last week’s off-year elections, which gave Democrats resounding victories across the country — and suggested voters wanted them to continue fighting for the health care subsidies.
“What Senate Dems who voted for this horses‑‑‑ deal did was f‑‑‑ over all the hard work people put in to Tuesday’s elections,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), a former head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, posted on social platform X. “Healthcare matters. Not platitudes.”
The criticisms also came from liberal activist groups, which have accused Democrats of not fighting hard enough against President Trump since his return to the White House this year.
“We cannot afford a divided and weak opposition party when an authoritarian is invading our cities, terrorizing our communities, and corruptly self-enriching at the expense of the rest of us,” Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, said in a statement after the deal was announced. “We hope to celebrate the Democratic Party for fighting back. But if they surrender, the next step is primaries and new leadership.
“We get the party we demand, and we intend to demand one that fights.”
Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, said the move by the Senate Democrats was “an absolute failure – voters expected their leaders to hold the line for their basic healthcare needs and instead, a handful of corporate Democrats surrendered to the GOP to let them raise premiums for millions of people.”
“This is exactly why we need Democratic primaries nationwide to build an opposition party that actually fights for working people, not selling the American people out when they get too tired to work for them,” he added.
The Democratic discord has its roots in an earlier spending fight, in March, when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) bucked a vast majority of his party to support a Republican budget bill crafted without Democratic input. The move infuriated liberals, some of whom suggested Schumer lacked the mettle to remain atop the party. Even House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) refused, at the time, to throw him a lifeline.
This time around, Schumer reversed course and, along with Jeffries, became a leading voice of the Democratic opposition to the Republicans’ short-term spending bill. In countless public appearances, the pair cited the urgency of addressing the expiring health care subsidies before millions of Americans get hit by higher costs next year.
Yet even that hasn’t quelled the lingering distrust between the left and Senate Democrats. Schumer might not have supported the new budget deal, the critics say, but as party leader he bears responsibility for letting the rank-and-file senators give away the Democrats’ only leverage in the fight for the ObamaCare subsidies.
“Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) wrote on X. “If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?”
The eight senators who helped Republicans advance the new spending bill — seven Democrats and Independent Sen. Angus King (Maine) — have defended their decision to compromise, arguing that the shutdown was harming millions of Americans with no end in sight. Any blame for the looming rise in health care costs, they added, should fall to Republicans who oppose virtually all elements of ObamaCare, including the premium subsidies that are set to expire.
“Staying in a shutdown mode was not getting us anywhere,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), one of the Democrats who voted for the bipartisan deal, told CNN on Monday. “They need to train their fire on the people who are responsible. That’s President Trump, Speaker Johnson, and the Republicans who have blocked every attempt to get healthcare.”
In a sign of just how contentious the issue is, however, even Shaheen’s daughter, Stefany Shaheen, who is running for a U.S. House seat in New Hampshire, blasted the agreement her mother supported just hours earlier.
Jeffries also expressed his “disappointment” with the new deal, saying the breakaway Democrats will “have to explain themselves” to base voters. In a rare concession, he acknowledged that the new landscape might mean that Congress won’t act in time to prevent the higher health care costs from taking effect.
The Democratic infighting marks a sharp reversal from the dynamics of just a few days ago, when Democrats were riding high following a blue wave in the Nov. 4 elections, and Republicans were engaged in their own civil war over Trump’s calls to abolish the filibuster — an idea opposed even by most GOP lawmakers in the Capitol.
Now the focus has shifted back to the Democratic frictions — and the disagreement over the wisdom of reopening the government without a concrete guarantee on the ObamaCare tax credits.
House Democrats are already lining up against the new spending agreement, but they have no power to block it in the lower chamber if Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is able to rally his GOP conference behind it. Those dynamics haven’t stopped Democrats from railing against the package — and the Senate Democrats who crafted it — as a betrayal of their pledge to voters.
“This deal fails on the one thing we promised to deliver for the American people,” Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) said Monday. “Millions of Americans are about to see their health care costs skyrocket, and we have nothing more to reassure them with than the hope that Senate Republicans and Speaker Johnson will do the right thing.”
Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Calif.) echoed those frustrations.
“I have no idea what their discussions were in the Senate — I have no idea what they thought they could accomplish,” she said. “I can only account for my own vote, and … we have been very united in the House that we’re not going to rubber stamp a Republican agenda that is so cruel and so callous and will so damage Americans and health care in this country.”
The House is expected to vote on the bill as early as Wednesday.
