Mainstream news coverage of Sunday night’s vote on a spending package that will likely reopen the government has been dominated by practical considerations about logistics and timing, effectively burying the real story, which is that it represented an epic collapse by Democratic leaders.
The coverage from our major news organizations is all about how eight Democrats “broke a stalemate” and “took a crucial step toward reopening the government.” It’s about next steps — and, secondarily, about the “rift” among Democrats.
But the long-term significance here is that elected Democrats went belly-up to Trump less than a week after the public expressed overwhelming opposition to the Trump agenda, and the grass roots feel stabbed in the back.
Here’s what my lead would have looked like:
The government shutdown was headed to an end after a group of Senate Democrats caved to Republican demands in a Sunday night vote, collapsing what had been a united front to prevent a massive increase in health insurance premiums.
As a result, those premiums are now expected to skyrocket, putting health insurance out of reach of millions of Americans.
For Democrats who had seen the battle over a spending package as their only political leverage in a Republican-dominated Washington, the action by eight Democratic senators was nothing short of betrayal – especially coming less than a week after elections that were widely seen as a public vote of confidence for Democratic opposition to the Trump agenda.
All the pain of a seven-week government shutdown appears to have been for naught, accomplishing nothing. The vote was a strategic fiasco for Democrats, supporting what had been a failing Republican narrative that Democrats were to blame for the shutdown, while rewarding Republicans for refusing to negotiate anything of substance. And it was a leadership debacle, as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, possibly on purpose, let his caucus fall apart, for reasons that have not been clearly articulated.
Compare that to the bloodless, incremental coverage by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press.
For the real story, you had to go to The Nation, or the American Prospect, or HuffPost – or BlueSky.
My point is that Sunday’s vote was big news not just because it will reopen the government, but because it firmly established that the current Democratic elected leadership does not constitute an effective opposition to Trump.
And the major news organizations didn’t get it — although they will, eventually, because what happens next is going to be one of the biggest news stories of the next year.