Democrats Say They Actually Won the Shutdown Battle

Schumer Democrats say they won the shutdown battle with the federal government. They believe they secured a key demand: extending health care subsidies for millions of Americans.

Actually, they only won a verbal agreement to vote on it, and they would need 60 votes.

For 43 days and growing, people have worked without paychecks and SNAP benefits (food stamps).

Progressive activists and their Democratic allies in Congress, who had wanted the party to fight on longer, called it a monumental “cave” to Donald Trump.

Others see a big win. The eight Senate Democrats who went against their leadership and negotiated an end to the longest shutdown in American history said the bipartisan deal protects federal workers who had been laid off during the shutdown— at least temporarily.

They would have been anyway. They were furloughed, not fired.

More importantly, they said, the grueling shutdown that is expected to end in the coming days has “crystallized” the battle lines in the next major political fight over health care that is sure to spill into the 2026 midterm election year. It also underscored Trump’s cruelty, Democratic leaders said, as the White House fought to halt food stamp payments to states during the shutdown.

Obamacare is a failing healthcare system for the 7% of Americans who use it. As for Trump’s cruelty, he didn’t have the money to pay it out. A Rhode Island judge told Trump to take it out of the fund for children’s free lunches.

Let’s not forget that Democrats shut down the government over a CLEAN CR for only 7 weeks to prepare appropriation bills. It was their leverage, they admitted.

Democrats will use it to bash the GOP and the media will back them up. If that’s the standard for winning, I guess they won but it required Americans to suffer.

Democrats are calling for Schumer to resign. The younger people coming up, who are far more to the left, want AOC in the Senate.

Republicans say they have something to replace Obamacare. Let’s hope so. Obamacare was meant to fail and morph into single payer.

As Sen. Fetterman says, Obamacare was drawn up to expire in December of this year.

John Fetterman drops a brutal truth bomb on his own party’s excuse for shutting down the government.

“I would love to have a conversation about extending the tax credits for health care. Absolutely. But I would remind everybody, too, this was DESIGNED by the Democratic Party to… pic.twitter.com/acumKhomBC

— Vigilant Fox (@VigilantFox) October 16, 2025