Jerry Shenk: The futility of understanding Democrats

In mid-2011, I opened a digital folder entitled “Understanding Democrats.” Today, more than 14 years and 784 entries later, I still don’t understand Democrats.

However, by supplementing biased national media with alternate media, one can observe everything Democrats actually do, and hear or read the things they say — Democrats seldom shut up — but it’s difficult to fully understand many of the things liberal Democrats claim to believe, the policies they prioritize, or the methods they employ in attempting to impose their political will.

For example, one struggles to explain how Democrats justify battles they cannot win. The recent government shutdown is a case in point.

More than six weeks ago, before funding expired, Senate Democrats refused to join Republicans in passing a clean House-approved continuing resolution to fund the federal government, something for which Democrats have always voted.

This time, Democrats demanded adding unrelated items, 1) the reversal of provisions in a bill enacted into law last summer that denied taxpayer-funded medical benefits to illegal aliens, and 2) a continuation of “temporary” supplemental COVID-era subsidies for Obamacare policyholders to prevent massive 2026 premium increases. Democrats, themselves, had specified the end-2025 sunset of the benefits.

COVID-era Democrats swore the inflated Obamacare subsidies were merely meant to be a temporary “economic bridge through the crisis,” but now, Democrats are claiming that returning to pre-COVID Obamacare would be catastrophic.

In other words, Senate Democrats denied funding the government 1) to benefit illegal aliens who broke laws to come and have no right to be here, and 2) to avoid having to admit that Obamacare, a complex, fundamental reform of America’s entire healthcare system — roughly a fifth of the American economy — contained in a 2,700-page bill unread by members of Congress and passed on a party-line vote, has failed.

In fact, Obamacare was destined to fail. The scheme used tax dollars, at first, to disguise its flaws and, later, to paper over its fatal weaknesses.

Hubris — and their desire to nationalize healthcare – motivated liberal Democrats to pass Obamacare, a/k/a, the “Affordable Care Act” that has proved anything but, and, now, Nemesis looms.

Democrats shut down the government to avoid facing that reality, while cynically using hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal employees, unpaid military families, and 42 million food stamp recipients as leverage.

With assistance from their national media handmaidens, woke celebrities and social media trolls, Democrats thought they could convince America that the shutdown was Republicans’ fault, even though Republicans voted repeatedly to fund the government. The gaslighting worked on nobody other than party drones predisposed to believe Democrats.

Factually, Senate Democrats’ filibusters of the continuing resolution forced a shutdown that the rest of the country referred to as the “Schumer shutdown,” after Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY).  Schumer was able to manage his caucus’s monolithic “Nay” vote on more than a dozen roll calls before the dam broke and eight Democrats crossed the aisle and voted with Republicans to fund/reopen the government.

The notion that the government shutdown was Republicans’ fault was ridiculous to anyone who noticed that it took defections by Senate Democrats to reopen it.

Furthermore, the angry reactions of other congressional Democrats and the party’s base to the defectors’ capitulation exposed their side’s culpability. Most wanted the government to remain closed.

Democrats, generally, were so opposed to reopening the government that they were willing to see people go hungry to make taxpayers foot the bill for illegal aliens’ health care, and to permit even wealthy policyholders to continue receiving Obamacare subsidies at the expense of millions of taxpayers who are not in the program.

They all knew people would suffer, and they didn’t care.

One defector, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) let the cat out of the bag: “Many of my friends are unhappy. They think we should have kept our government closed indefinitely to protest the policies of the Trump administration … but [I] cannot accept a strategy which wages political battle at the expense of my neighbor’s paycheck or the food for his children.”

Durbin and another defector are retiring, others represent states President Donald Trump won, so, other than Schumer, who only might be out as Leader, angry Democrats will have to take their vengeance on … whom …?

Undeterred — and unenlightened — by this failure, Democrats may try it again next year, because … that damn Trump!

Contact columnist Jerry Shenk at jshenk2010@gmail.com