After 43 days, the longest US government shutdown in history is coming to an end.
Federal workers will start receiving pay again. National Parks will reopen. Government services that had been curtailed or suspended entirely will resume. Air travel, which had become a nightmare for many Americans, will return to being merely frustrating.
After the dust settles and the ink from President Donald Trump’s signature on the funding bill dries, what has this record-setting shutdown accomplished? And what has it cost?
Senate Democrats, through their use of the parliamentary filibuster, were able to trigger the shutdown despite being a minority in the chamber by refusing to go along with a Republican measure to temporarily fund the government.
They drew a line in the sand, demanding that the Republicans agree to extend health insurance subsidies for low-income Americans that are set to expire at the end of the year.
When a handful of Democrats broke ranks to vote to reopen the government on Sunday, they received next to nothing in return – a promise of a vote in the Senate on the subsidies, but no guarantees of Republican support or even a necessary vote in the House of Representatives.
Since then, members of the party’s left flank have been furious.
They’ve accused Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer – who didn’t vote for the funding bill – of being secretly complicit in the reopening plan or simply incompetent. They’ve felt like their party folded even after off-year election success showed they had the upper hand. They feared that the shutdown sacrifices had been for nothing.
Even more mainstream Democrats, like California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, called the shutdown deal “pathetic” and a “surrender”.
“I’m not coming in to punch anybody in the face,” he told the Associated Press, “but I’m not pleased that, in the face of this invasive species that is Donald Trump, who’s completely changed the rules of the game, that we’re still playing by the old rules of the game.”
Newsom has 2028 presidential ambitions and can be a good barometer for the mood of the party. He was a loyal supporter of Joe Biden who turned out to defend the then-president even after his disastrous June debate performance against Trump.
If he is running for the pitchforks, it’s not a good sign for Democratic leaders.
For Trump, in the days since the Senate deadlock broke on Sunday, his mood has gone from cautious optimism to celebration.
On Tuesday, he congratulated congressional Republicans and called the vote to reopen the government “a very big victory”.
“We’re opening up our country,” he said at a Veteran’s Day commemoration at Arlington Cemetery. “It should have never been closed.”
Trump, perhaps sensing the Democratic anger toward Schumer, joined the pile-on during a Fox News interview on Monday night.
“He thought he could break the Republican Party, and the Republicans broke him,” Trump said of the Senate Democrat.
Although there were times when Trump appeared to be buckling – last week he berated Senate Republicans for refusing to scrap the filibuster to reopen the government – he ultimately emerged from the shutdown having made little in the way of substantive concessions.
While his poll numbers have declined over the last 40 days, there’s still a year before Republicans have to face voters in the midterms. And, barring some kind of constitutional rewrite, Trump never has to worry about standing for election again.
With the end of the shutdown, Congress will get back to its regularly scheduled programming. Although the House of Representatives has effectively been on ice for more than a month, Republicans still hope they can pass some substantive legislation before next year’s election cycle kicks in.
While several government departments will be funded until September in the shutdown-ending agreement, Congress will have to approve spending for the rest of the government by the end of January to avoid another shutdown.
Democrats, licking their wounds, may be hankering for another chance to fight.
Meanwhile, the issue they fought over – healthcare subsidies – could become a pressing concern for tens of millions of Americans who will see their insurance costs double or triple at the end of the year. Republicans ignore addressing such voter pain at their own political peril.
And that isn’t the only peril facing Trump and the Republicans. A day that was supposed to be highlighted by the House government-funding vote was spent dwelling on the latest revelations surrounding the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Later on Wednesday, Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva was sworn in to her congressional seat and became the 218th and final signatory on a petition that will force the House of Representatives to hold a vote ordering the justice department to release all its files on the Epstein case.
It was enough to prompt Trump to complain, on his Truth Social website, that his government-funding success was being eclipsed.
“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects,” he wrote.
It was all a very clear reminder that the best-laid plans and political strategies can be derailed in a flash.
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