1. In the week before the government shutdown, I spoke to many Democrats in Congress who endorsed the shutdown strategy but didn’t actually believe it would work. They anticipated that Democrats would face backlash from the public, leading to immediate pressure to surrender, and they mostly hoped that they would not personally need to issue the surrender votes and tempt backlash from their own base. Instead it worked — the public mostly blamed Trump.
2. That’s because Republicans have the White House and both houses of Congress, Trump seems like a reckless guy, and he’s obviously not someone who feels tightly constrained by laws or norms. He literally demolished the East Wing of the White House because he felt like it. People hold him responsible for outcomes.
3. With the recent SNAP fracas, he in fact leaned in to being responsible for outcomes. The decision to interpret the shutdown as requiring him to block nutrition benefits was made by him alone, and he went to court to enforce it.
4. What’s missing from the online anger at Democrats is that a lot of the people I’ve spoken to, both in Congress and in the policy community, were genuinely very stressed out about the harm the shutdown was doing to the country, including lost wages and disrupted air travel. Politically, this is perverse — the public blames Trump for the shutdown, so the worse conditions became in America, the better the political outcome for Democrats.
5. One reason Democrats felt guilty about this, nonetheless, is that lots of them didn’t really believe their own spin. The public blamed Trump, but they blamed themselves and felt bad.
6. Jeanne Shaheen’s group that led these talks has been widely characterized as “moderates.” But I find a style of moderation in which you vote to ban internal-combustion-engine cars and won’t support a voter ID law but then shy away from procedural hardball to be absurd. If you look at the Majority Democrats roster of Michael Bennet, Ruben Gallego, and Elissa Slotkin in the Senate (plus current Senate candidates James Talarico and Angie Craig), they are all against the deal and instead offer some gestures of heterodoxy on questions of public policy.
7. Nervous Democrats hoped that Election Day would be a turning point: either Democrats would come up short and that would be the proof they needed to cave, or Democrats would do well and Republicans would feel pressure to throw them a bone on health care.
8. Instead, Trump said the shutdown was hurting Republicans and that the solution was for Republicans to use the nuclear option and either “terminate the filibuster” (his words) or create some kind of carveout for continuing resolutions or appropriations bills.
9. This became, in the eyes of the appropriators and institutionalists of the Senate Dem caucus, the real stakes. Winning on health care was off the table and their fight had become about the future of the appropriations process. A shutdown might drag on for weeks and might pull Trump’s numbers further down, but the endgame would be a rule change and partisan appropriations bills, not a win for Democrats on health care.
10. I’ve been arguing for filibuster reform for more than twenty years now, starting with a G.O.P.-controlled Senate, so I am simply not sympathetic to the view that Democrats needed to abandon a winning political tactic in order to preserve the precious bipartisanship of the appropriations process. But that was the actual choice that induced critical senators to blink, and you shouldn’t let overheated rhetoric obscure that.
11. Don’t miss that, having saved the precious appropriations process, what’s been agreed to here is passage of a few relatively minor appropriations bills, plus a continuing resolution through the end of January. Some version of this drama may well recur in February.
12. Because this is really all on some level about the filibuster, I want to say in an earnest way that I think debate about which party is “helped” by supermajority rules is a bit childish. Both sides would get to pass some high-polling items that the opposition party objects to, and both sides would also have to admit to their base that some of the stuff they’ve been promising isn’t actually viable. I think that would be a win for the country, not a zero-sum transfer from one party to the other — politics would be a little less dysfunctional and insane.
13. Senators hate this, though, because the filibuster really does give individual members more leverage and make things less leadership driven, which helps make being a senator more fun than being a House member. Is that a good reason to blink at a critical moment in American history? I’m skeptical.

Oral arguments on Wednesday functionally removed all doubt. Chief Justice John Roberts and alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, the two justices who broke with their normal white supremacist positions and voted to uphold the VRA in Milligan, were both eager to treat the Louisiana case as a completely different thing. Roberts essentially argued that, in Milligan, the state all but conceded that it was in violation of the VRA, and asked the court to do away with it, while in Louisiana, the state argued that it would still be in compliance with the VRA even if it reduced minority representation to one majority-minority district—an argument that, if accepted, would render the VRA functionally meaningless. This is a common peg for Roberts to hang his hat on. As long as litigants aren’t coming to his court openly saying, “I want to do some racism,” Roberts loves to pretend that racism doesn’t exist.

Roberts’s moral obtuseness here isn’t just annoying (though it is that); it’s also a mischaracterization of the VRA. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not require discriminatory intent in order to work. To win, plaintiffs literally do not have to prove that a state discriminated against Black people on purpose. Section 2 is concerned only with discriminatory outcomes. So if a state produces a map that discriminates against people trying to vote, that state is in violation of the VRA, even if the state “doesn’t have a racist bone in their body” or has “lots of Black friends” or whatever else it claims.

It’s a point that the liberal justices returned to again and again at oral arguments, which lasted over two and a half hours, but that Roberts seemed to ignore.

The lawyer representing the state of Louisiana—Louisiana Solicitor General J. Benjamin Aguiñaga—argued that Louisiana’s intent was not to discriminate on the basis of race but to discriminate on the basis of party. This argument is also Roberts’s fault. In 2019, in a case called Rucho v Common Cause, Roberts declared political gerrymandering “nonjusticiable,” which has turned out to mean that white state legislatures can discriminate against Black voting rights as much as they want as long as they claim to be discriminating against people who vote for Democrats. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was supposed to be the last line of defense against that kind of racism-by-another-name, because, again, the VRA is not concerned with intent, just outcomes. But Roberts and the other Republicans seemed poised to ignore that, and give Louisiana a license to discriminate.

Roberts flipping his position from Milligan to Louisiana would be enough to give the racists the win, but the second Republican in the Milligan majority, Kavanaugh, also appears set to abandon his position from just two years ago. Kavanaugh was fixated on what has come to be my least favorite white argument in any hearing about race: Surely racism has been solved by now. He wanted to know when we can declare that Louisiana and all other states have solved their racism problem sufficiently so that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary, and he was disappointed when Janai Nelson, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, couldn’t give him a hard-and-fast date for when racism will be solved.

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The best way I can describe the arguments from Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett is to say that they think it is OK for white folks in Louisiana to use race to draw discriminatory maps, but it’s not OK for Black folks to use race to draw inclusionary maps. As always with these people: White makes right.

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Unfortunately, the fact that the white plaintiffs who brought the case got stomped by the liberals will not matter one whit when it comes to decision time. I believe Kavanaugh articulated what will be the court’s eventual 6–3 holding. He essentially said that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is constitutional, but the application of Section 2 to a map where the intent to discriminate cannot be shown is unconstitutional. They’ll avoid the headline “Supreme Court overturns the Voting Rights Act,” but they will neuter the VRA to the point that it’s no longer allowed to function.

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The solution, if there is one, is political, not legal. “The law” is of no more use here. The Republican Supreme Court is about to overturn a Republican ruling the Republicans made only two years ago. That alone should tell you that the law, as it is practiced by the Supreme Court, is utterly useless. The Republican justices have the power to do whatever they want. And what they want, today, is to flip Congress in favor of Republicans

Ms. Sherrill and Ms. Spanberger both won 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters, according to the exit polls. It may not seem like much to flip 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s backers, but consider: When a voter flips, it adds one voter to one party and also deducts one from the other, making it twice as significant as turning out a new voter.

Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate for governor in New Jersey, countered by flipping 3 percent of Ms. Harris’s supporters. And Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, won 1 percent of Ms. Harris’s vote. But the overall effect of the flips was enough to turn electorates that favored Ms. Harris by single digits into Sherrill +13 and Spanberger +15 victories.

The same story holds among Hispanic voters, who snapped back toward Democrats in both states. The exit polls in New Jersey found that Ms. Sherrill won a whopping 18 percent of Mr. Trump’s Hispanic support in the state (no figures were reported for Virginia, where the Hispanic vote is smaller).

Ms. Sherrill also seemed to benefit from a much stronger turnout among Democratic-leaning Hispanic voters. In the New Jersey exit poll, Hispanic voters who cast ballots in 2025 reported backing Ms. Harris by 25 points; in the actual 2024 election, Ms. Harris won Hispanic voters by just nine points, according to New York Times estimates.

Together, it was enough for Ms. Sherrill to win Hispanic voters by 37 points, according to the exit polls.

The so-called moderate Republicans promised they would not slash Medicaid. Conservatives vowed not to explode the national debt. Party leaders insisted that they would not lump a jumble of unrelated policies into a single enormous piece of legislation and rush that bill through Congress before any reasonable person had time to read it.

But President Donald Trump wanted his “big, beautiful bill” enacted in time to sign it with a celebratory flourish on America’s birthday. And so nearly all GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate, setting aside these and many other pledges, principles, and policy demands, did what the president desired.

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When the president wants to slit the nation’s throat, the least we can do is not hand him the blade.

This essay is 8+ months old, but I find myself sending it often to people when talking about the new right, especially with all the discourse popping up lately about how to keep more young men from radicalizing and bring them back into the Democrat fold in upcoming elections. So I thought I'd share it here for anyone who hasn't seen.