Sorry, Jon Stewart, You Can Believe That the Democrats Caved on the Shutdown

Jon Stewart’s irate rant about the Democrats surrendering in the shutdown fight, which aired on Monday night, is funny. But it also inadvertently illuminated three factors in the thinking of Democratic elites as the shutdown stretched into 40-day territory.

First, Stewart insists that the Democrats’ shutdown strategy was working, by asserting that it had a completely different goal than what Democratic lawmakers said their goal was.

“It was working. Never, never, never has the gap between this administration and the people it claims to serve been so disgustingly visible than during this shutdown.”

Okay, but the point of the shutdown, we were told by Democrats, was to make permanent the tax credits for ACA insurance purchases. Or, at minimum, Democrats wanted to get those credits extended for as long as possible. It wasn’t to illuminate that Trump was callous or arrogant or elitist or out-of-touch. You can do that in a lot of ways that do not involve gradually bringing air travel across the country to a grinding halt and making 730,000 federal government workers work without pay for longer than the Great Flood.

Did you see any sign that President Trump, Senate Republicans, and House Republicans were reaching the point where they were willing to agree to extend the tax credits for ACA insurance purchases?

GOP House members Jeff Hurd of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia were on board. There were definitely Republicans who were nervous about getting blamed for higher insurance premiums. And GOP frustration over the shutdown was increasing. But if Republicans really were about to make concessions, it’s odd that Jon Stewart could see this but that none of those eight Democratic senators could see it. Stewart conveniently asserts without evidence that the Democrats really just aimed to harm Trump’s image the whole time. And if that was the primary objective, why does Stewart contend that this was such a giant surrender?

Second, Stewart demonstrates that the Democratic rage at the Trump administration is about all kinds of things, not just tax credits for the Obamacare exchanges. After playing a clip of Trump saying “We have no inflation,” the host fumed, “Except that we have inflation! And normally, ‘We have no inflation’ goes the way of ‘They’re eating the cats and dogs’ and ‘I’m suing Rupert Murdoch because I’m not on the Epstein list,’ and all of the other lies that Trump deploys in his reality distortion arsenal.”

So even if Chuck Schumer and company had somehow managed to win that concession, the progressive grassroots and lots of other Democrats would still be angry about all the other things Trump has done and is doing — inflation, Epstein, false claims made a year ago about Haitian immigrants eating pets, etc. There was no way that Senate Democrats were coming out of this showdown with the grassroots cheerfully saying, “Good job, guys!” because Trump would generate some other outrage, probably within hours, if not minutes. The Democrats aren’t angry because Trump and the Republicans won’t extend some tax credits; the Democrats are angry because Trump and the Republicans exist.

Finally, Stewart talks about the government shutdown fight for about 20 minutes, and there is absolutely no mention of the federal government workers who were working without pay. And only a passing mention of the cutoff of food stamps.

Now, when the Republican side is the one that refuses to vote for a continuing resolution to reopen the government, we get all kinds of sad stories about the financial squeeze on federal workers, elementary school students who couldn’t go on their field trip to the Smithsonian, disappointed vacationers unable to enjoy the national park system, and so on. But the moment that Democrats shut down the government, those sad stories disappear into thin air. The largest union of federal workers urged Democrats to pass a clean continuing resolution and reopen the government, and Democrats didn’t even blink.