SENATE CAVING ON HEALTH CARE DARKENS DEMOCRATS ENTHUSIASM

A Lifeline for Trump and GOP

Eight Senate Democrats are the Atlanta Falcons of today’s political world: they choked.

The Falcons snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the 2017 Super Bowl when they blew a 25 point lead they held late in the third quarter.

Those eight Democratic Senators -- actually seven and independent Angus King of Maine, who votes with the Democrats -- abandoned the insistence to extend the Obamacare tax subsidies, which expire at the end of the year, in order to end a government shutdown. Most of the public blamed the Republicans and Trump for the impasse; these Democrats bailed them out.

They noted they got a guarantee for a Senate vote next month on the subsidies. But it would have to pass the Senate, and the House --where Speaker Mike Johnson has indicated he has no intention of bringing it up for a vote -- and signed by Trump.

The odds of pulling all this off are somewhere between slim and none.

Moreover, these lawmakers -- King, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Virginia’s Tim Kaine, and Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman -- put a damper on Democrats’ enthusiasm after huge election victories last Tuesday.

Following that, infighting was largely limited to a small contingent of leftists, inspired by the election of Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as the next Mayor of New York City versus the much larger mainstream progressives who won scores of victories in the country, highlighted by electing Governors in New Jersey and Virginia.

Now infighting has spread well beyond an ideological dispute. Top Democrats from California’s Gavin Newsom -- the deal is “pathetic” -- to Senate colleagues, like Connecticut’s Chris Murphy who was “saddened” those eight Senators didn’t listen to last week’s voters.

The sell out was opposed by all Democrats up for election next year and many challengers. In New Hampshire, a House hopeful Stefany Shaheen criticized the deal; one of the Democrats supporting the deal was her mother, Sen. Shaheen.

This has intensified the heat on Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, who though he voted against the measure, is being assailed for an inability to control his own caucus.

The expiration of the subsidies would cause considerable harm. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) estimates premiums will increase by an average of 75%, leaving as many as four million newly uninsured. Some working and middle class families will see premium increases of well over $1,000; in addition to knocking millions off insurance rolls, there likely will be delayed diagnoses or treatments and skipping medications.

Reliable data shows that when Americans lose health insurance it increases deaths.

Defenders of the deal say that ending the longest government shutdown in history means federal workers return to their jobs, recipients of SNAP or food stamps will get benefits and airline travel will return to normal. They claim Trump and the Republicans were dug in on the shutdown.

Yet with the GOP electoral defeats, polls showing most of the public blamed Republicans, and with the President’s approval ratings plummeting, I suspect Trump would have found a cover, a ruse, to back down unless he could persuade the Senate to end the filibuster rules.

Those eight Democratic Senators, lousy bargainers, believe the fiction that the Senate is still the Senate of yesteryear, a place where trust, and good will is present even in deeply partisan times. The reality: most of the current Senate Republicans are wholly owned subsidiaries of Trump, who sees good will and trust as signs of weakness.

The one glimmer of hope for Democrats is the bill, likely to pass later this week, extends funding only through the end of January. If, as likely, Republicans continue to do nothing on Obamacare, they will have one other chance not to choke.