Fetterman is a disgrace I flipping hate this dude

You mean these Dems are in cahoots with the GOP. There's no fucking reason why to back down now when the pressure is on unless their handlers are telling them to.

These spineless Democrats do not need to cave. The GOP can end the shutdown anytime they want.

Once again pulling defeat out of the jaws of victory. All they had to do was literally nothing, but they couldn't even be trusted to do that.

I don’t understand what the calculation was here. People were hurting, but a whole lot more people are going to hurt without health insurance come next year. They got:

• a vote on healthcare extension in December: almost certain to fail and even if succeeding, open enrollment ends 12/15. So you’d potentially be making people gamble thousands of dollars per month that this unlikely vote succeeds and effects them immediately
• written into the law that federal employees get back pay - which is already federal law
• reverses lay offs that occurred during the shut down - which were illegal
• it only funds the government through January. So we’re going to be right back in this situation. And then what - we tell these poor SNAP recipients, “oh sorry, we’re going to need you to go though this whole thing again because we wanted to make sure people could fly home for thanksgiving.”

Hard to imagine a moderate winning a national primary after this. And what the hell is the republican answer for why it was so important that people not get slightly more affordable healthcare that it was worth starving people.

I hope that at the least, the re-establishment of SNAP will be quick.

For those paying attention. It ended when the FAA started to ground private planes due to staffing shortages.

Those mega donors are the ones who pressured the vote. Not for the good of society. But because they started to get inconvenienced.

Absolute fucking pussies.

Fuck Chuck.

Thanks for giving the GOP what they wanted, "lesser evil" members of Congress.

And I had hope they would keep the pressure on the fascists, silly me.

I knew they were controlled opposition but this is going above and beyond the call of duty.

All this time, just to cave to the word of the Republicans is nasty work and on purpose. There is always a group of Dems who are Republicans best allies.

Why the fuck did they start offering concessions and bargaining after they swept the state elections last week?

More evidence that moderates are not allies and are just as fearful of a leftward popular swing as the Republicans are.

Absolutely fucking pathetic

The Democrats could fuck up a wet dream.

“Deal”

Give the GOP everything it wants. Get nothing in return.

I hate the Democrats so so much. They never fight. Every time it looks like they might fight, it turns out that they’re not fighting. Their relentless cowardice is why we have trump and the fascists dismantling everything and hurting people.

A new list of Dems to vote out with new lefties.

This is how a party dies.

Any deal that doesn't put everything in one bill is worthless.

Let's pretend for one moment that Republicans actually joined Democrats in passing the extension of ACA credits and any other concessions they got in the negotiations. Even if they passed the bill, Trump can just veto it. As long as he gets what he needs in a separate bill, he can veto anything else. And if there's enough support for the compromise to overturn a veto, there's enough to prevent it by passing it all as one bill.

But I'm sure Schumer will happily explain how Republicans voting against the ACA credits will be on their permanent record and how that will make this all worthwhile.

Durbin is on his way out, parting gift to his cronies I guess

Traitors

My first thought was also, the democrats are pussies and caved again.

My second thought was getting that Epstein vote, coincidentally after some recent Epstein news...

A boy can dream. We'll see if they do some more funny business to block the release.

Open the gov and swear in Adelita Grijalva.

Even if your Democratic senator didn't vote for this, call them up and call them out for allowing the spinless democrats to once again get fucked by Republicans for nothing.

These people are unhinged militant centrists.

It may seem paradoxical, but it is actually possible to be an extreme centrist. The hard truth of American politics is that there are no actual centrist voters. You won't find any significant number of people whose views largely lie right between the platforms of the two parties. What you have instead are voters whose views simply don't align well with the existing party coalitions. Their views may still be extremely strong. Think someone that is extremely pro-choice while also owning a dozen AR-15s. Maybe they have a home in the Libertarian Party, but they have no real home in either major party. They believe passionately on both subjects, they are anything but moderate for both their support of abortion choice and guns. But because their views don't map cleanly to one side or the other's arbitrary grab bag of chosen issues, this voter is called a centrist. But they're not really a centrist. They just have weak partisan alignment.

But people like these? They are actual militant centrists. In many way these politicians are the only true centrists in America. They have formed a worldview that concludes that the right answer to any single issue must lie right in the middle between the two sides. One side wants to raise taxes on the rich while the other wants to cut them? The obviously correct answer must be to keep the taxes steady. Trump wants to turn millions of legal immigrants into illegal immigrants and then deport them, while progressives want to deport no law-abiding person? The correct answer must be to brutalize merely a few thousand innocent people. Progressives want to protect trans rights while Republicans want to liquidate trans people in ovens? The obvious answer must be some roll back of trans civil rights.

People like Schumer, Fetterman, etc. are militant centrists. They will obsessively tack to the very middle of any issue. And this is fundamentally a purely ideological position, the same as any extremist. A militant racist is so committed to theories of racial superiority that they'll want to see racist policies enacted, even if they hurt the country, even if they hurt the racist themselves, regardless of even if white people are hurt. A militant socialist might demand state ownership of every type of business and enterprise, even if there's no market failure and private companies can run those things just fine. You would have to be a pretty extreme socialist to think that the government should be running bars for example.

This is the defining feature of extremism and militancy - a willingness to put one's own ideology above everything else. All that matters is the ideology. It is correct with a capital C. It is truth with a capital T. Any evidence against the ideology is dismissed or explained away.

These people are not moderate. They are militant centrists. Pick an issue, no matter the context or the evidence clear for all to see. They will always tack right in the middle between the two sides. They believe, in their heart of hearts, that the middle path is always the correct one. And they don't care how many people have to die to keep their cherished view of centrism preserved. They are as extreme and militant as any far-right militia member. They just follow the ideology of centrism rather than conservatism.

Fuck this shit pathetic