Wait, Did the Democrats Just Win a Government Shutdown Fight?

Still, it’s a deal that suggests that Democrats are still paying for mistakes they made at the start of Trump’s second term. In January 2025, in the wake of Democrats’ shocking election loss, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer gave vulnerable members an opportunity to showcase their hard-line immigration credentials: He signaled he would vote to advance the Laken Riley Act, a hard-line immigration bill that had passed the House, without receiving any guarantees to amend it. That egregious bill—which mandated that immigrants be detained even if they were only accused of a crime, and empowered attorneys general to sue government agencies for not enforcing immigration laws strictly enough—was signed into law on the ninth day of Trump’s term. Schumer ultimately voted against it, but it was backed by 12 of his Democratic colleagues (and 46 of them in the House).

In some ways, Friday’s deal recalls the deal Schumer reached last fall to reopen the government after 43 days. The Democrats had forced a shutdown over a demand to restore Obamacare subsidies that were causing health care costs to skyrocket. Then, on November 8, Schumer caved, striking a deal to reopen the government in exchange for practically nothing.

The situation this week is similar. Democrats promised their voters they’d use a shutdown to achieve an improbable policy victory, then agreed to end the shutdown without winning it. In both cases, you see the same approach: a reluctance to continue any risky strategy for too long, for fear of taking the lion’s share of the political blowback. I would argue that backing down was more sensible this week than it was in November, but the overall calculus was the same. Schumer is caught in a cycle of making promises to the base that he either has no intention to keep or knows have little chance of being fulfilled.