Trump and the GOP Won the Shutdown. Let’s Make Sure Trophies Are Taken. | The American Spectator

Sunday night, the inevitable finally happened and the Senate Democrats finally cracked. After more than 40 days of pointless filibustering, which furthered a government shutdown from which most Americans saw no measureable effects and weren’t particularly transfixed by, seven of them — plus a Democrat-leaning independent — joined the Republicans (except for the increasingly tiresome Rand Paul) in producing 60 votes for an amended continuing resolution on the federal budget which does a few noteworthy things.

The CR covers federal spending through the end of January, which avoids the destructive customary end-of-the-year omnibus crush through which Congress has blown so much wasteful spending, and it also gives some time for the nine unpassed federal budget bills to make their way through the legislative process. House Speaker Mike Johnson has made it his mission to return the budget process to “regular order,” which is defined as both houses passing the 12 appropriations bills on time each year and thus needing no continuing resolutions to keep the government’s operations uninterrupted. Before the just-ended shutdown fight and the Democrats’ decision to filibuster the short-term CR, it looked like there was a real chance of getting back to regular order for the first time this century. (RELATED: The Shutdown Cometh, and Not a Moment Too Soon)

Maybe it’ll happen before the current CR expires. Three of the 12 bills have now passed both houses. Later this week, the House will pass the amended versions of the Military Construction-Veterans Affairs bill, the Agriculture bill, and the Legislative Branch bill.

Additionally, the CR will fund the SNAP program through the end of the just-commenced current fiscal year, meaning future Democrat filibusters for the next 11 months won’t threaten anyone with starvation. Federal workers will get full back pay. And the reductions-in-force that Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought executed last month are reversed, which does not mean the people in those jobs are necessarily rehired; Vought might opt to hire different people in those positions or to confirm the RIFs. (RELATED: The Sombrero Shutdown Needs Some Time to Deliver Its Benefits)

This is awfully, awfully thin gruel for the Democrats. They have unquestionably lost the shutdown fight.

We know now that most of the filibustering the Democrats engaged in over the past six weeks was pure politics. It was all about ginning up their base for last week’s elections, and particularly in Virginia, where they were trying to pass a slate of truly noxious candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. That worked, as all the furloughed federal employees in Northern Virginia had nothing better to do than turn into an army of get-out-the-vote activists, and with GOP voters less than enthused about their own slate, the Dems had a big cycle and were able to shape a narrative of a party on the comeback trail. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: The Mamdani Matriarchy Sets Up Shop In NYC)

And it’s certainly the narrative they want. The problem is that it doesn’t contain a lot of substance. And it’s already fallen apart after Sunday night’s collapse.

Let’s not kid ourselves — the GOP coalition is definitely a winning one, but only when it actually shows up. And old-school, blue-blood Bush Republicans who aren’t comfortable pushing America First policies and messaging like they actually care about winning do not turn out today’s Republican voters. That confers an advantage for Democrats, which can save them in off-year and off-cycle elections.

But it doesn’t change the fact that the public hates the current Democrat Party.

And what we’re seeing now that the filibuster has fallen apart and the Schumer Shutdown stormtroopers have gotten routed is that the Democrats actually hate each other. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 295: Will Terminating the Filibuster End the Government Shutdown?)

For example…

Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced. If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) November 10, 2025

After spending weeks insisting the Republicans caused the shutdown, the entire base is enraged that Democrats aren’t continuing to cause the shutdown https://t.co/o954TnwOrd pic.twitter.com/rWPgumE2yX

— Jared Taylor Swift (@DemsRealRacists) November 10, 2025

Oh, they absolutely hate Chuck Schumer now.

Nobody should feel sorry for Chuck the Schmuck, who is one of the most noxious political hacks ever to pollute the halls of the U.S. Senate, but he was in an impossible situation that he had no good way out of. (RELATED: The Democrats Again Perform a Self-Own in Federal Shutdown)

Schumer is a socialist, but he’s still more of an old-school liberal — crooked, to be sure, but not a revolutionary — than a lot of his more “modern” colleagues among Democrats on Capitol Hill. He knew that attempting to fight a rearguard action on budgets and shutdowns wouldn’t get his party anywhere, and he managed to get them to act on that knowledge back in March when the last CR came through. But the Hard Left villified Schumer for not leading a filibuster then; it didn’t matter to them that he was right.

It didn’t matter to Schumer, either, because this time, with the stakes a lot higher, he folded to the Hard Left and led the filibuster.

For nothing.

Schumer and his team demanded a rollback of the Big Beautiful Bill, and specifically a surrender on its paring back spending on healthcare, which, it turns out, results in free stuff for illegal aliens. That didn’t happen. He wanted a surrender on Democrat demands that Biden/COVID-era subsidies for Obamacare premiums be continued past their expiration date, and all he got was an agreement that those would be voted on next month. (RELATED: Give Them Nothing, Speaker Johnson)

And there could be an extension of those subsidies. But probably not without some Republican ideas for reforming Obamacare of a lot of its waste and fraud thrown into the mix. It’s unlikely that the Democrats get anything more than a Pyrrhic victory out of that fight in December.

One of the biggest problems for Schumer is that his own side knows what happened on Sunday. Of those who broke the filibuster, John Fetterman and Catherine Cortez-Masto, plus the Democrat-caucusing independent Angus King, were always against shutting down the government. The other five — Dick Durbin, Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, Tim Kaine, and Jacky Rosen — were either on their way out or politically damaged by the shutdown and needed relief. Schumer cut them loose to “betray” Democrat unity because the shutdown wasn’t all fun and games anymore.

Not with SNAP benefits getting cut off and airports shutting down for lack of air traffic controllers.

What we know now is that we can have a six-week government shutdown, and if it’s managed competently by the executive branch, most of the country won’t care. Hit that six-week mark, and things get ugly enough that somebody has to admit they lost the game of chicken.

Which is Schumer. Who even took a knife in the back from Temu Obama, his fellow New Yorker, who is now all in with the Hard Left…

My statement on the spending legislation and Republican healthcare crisis. pic.twitter.com/lKsft6fbJ6

— Hakeem Jeffries (@RepJeffries) November 9, 2025

The Hard Leftists in the Democrat Party all know that the shutdown was performative. They know that because they were the performers, but now they know that Schumer was also performing. He was pretending that he was with them, but when the shutdown actually had real stakes, he sold them out by sending the people with either the least or the most to lose to go and break the filibuster.

He’s going to lose his job as Minority Leader over this, and probably his Senate seat after next year’s Democrat primary in New York. None of that is much of a shock, of course — he’s been there far too long and any sane party would have already begun phasing him out of power (and no, the GOP is not sane, either; look how long Morphine Mitch McConnell was allowed to micturate in the party’s mess kit before something was finally done about him).

But there is no succession plan among Democrats in the Senate. There is no talented young leader ready to assume the reins of power on their side, and certainly no one who can rally the American people around a rejuvenated, solutions-driven Democrat Party in advance of the midterms.

What’s coming is a civil war among the Democrats, and it’s going to be bloody. Watch for lots more retirements among their people on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks to follow Nancy Pelosi’s pulling the “eject” lever last week, and knife-fights galore in the primary races in the House and Senate. (RELATED: How Nancy Pelosi Betrayed the People She Pretended to Protect)

The active ingredient in the party is the Mamdani/AOC wing driving it to the far left, and the old-line liberal corruptocrats like Schumer and Pelosi, who plugged the Democrats into the Deep State and profited off the turning of the machine’s gears for decades, are simply out of gas. The problem is that the Mamdani/AOC wing is stupid and crazy and anti-American in all the ways that count.

And most of the public, the people who are generally relatively somnambulent voters but will turn out for midterms and presidential elections, want nothing to do with ultra-woke, stupid communist politicians from dysfunctional deep blue cities.

If the Republicans were smart, they’d unleash a whirlwind of legislation and dare Schumer and the Dems to filibuster all of it. Ram the nine remaining appropriations bills through the House and throw them in Schumer’s face, and then bring bills on every 80-20 issue the Democrats are on the wrong side of and legislate as aggressively as you dare.

Let them spend the majority of the next four months fighting against election integrity, for sharia law, for boys in girls’ locker rooms and pediatric sex changes, for welfare queens and Venezuelan and Mexican drug lords, and for all manner of other justly lost causes.

And when they’ve utterly burned themselves by next spring, drop a repeal-and-replace Obamacare bill that contains every good Republican idea and let them try to filibuster it.

Thankfully, the shutdown impasse was broken before ending the filibuster needed to be seriously debated. But that question will come again. When it does, rather than ending the filibuster altogether, Senate Majority Leader John Thune should insist on instituting a physical filibuster — the Mr. Smith Goes To Washington ordeal in which the filibusterers have to physically hold the floor of the Senate, speaking for hours on end, one after another, until all of them are exhausted.

That should have already been imposed on Schumer and his unruly minions. Now that they’ve been broken, there should be no quarter given.

It’s time to legislate. It’s time to take the spoils of this victory and to leave the defeated enemy utterly demoralized and begging for mercy not to be given. Step on the gas, Mike Johnson and John Thune, and don’t let this moment go to waste.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

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