After the US government shutdown ends, what's the future of the Democrat Party?

The longest government shutdown in U.S. history is over, ending 43 days that paralyzed Washington. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers went unpaid and millions of Americans were forced to manage without food stamps. President Trump's Republicans are celebrating victory, while many Democrats regret that they failed to push through an extension to public health care subsidies. President Trump signs the bill, ending the country's longest ever shutdown. Trump put all the blame for the shutdown on his political opponents. After six weeks and more than a dozen failed attempts, the House of Representatives passed the Senate deal to fund the government and end the shutdown. The news will be celebrated by many across the nation. The fallout, having left more than a million federal employees unpaid or out of work, food benefits to many low-income Americans suspended, thousands of flights for airline passengers canceled or delayed. But many are not convinced by Trump's claims. And many Democrats are angry that a long standoff launched by their Senate members failed to secure a deal to extend federal health insurance subsidies, an issue that came to dominate the shutdown. But with temporary funding only secured through to January 30th, and political tensions higher than ever, the next stalemate might not be far away. What did this longest government shutdown in U.S. history achieve? Well, over the short term, it didn't achieve very much in the sense that the Democrats didn't get what they said they were, that they had gauged in this shutdown for, which is to get an extension, as your reporting mentioned, of those credits, subsidies for health care. But what they did do was kind of show or highlight what this budget would mean for millions and millions of Americans, particularly those who stand to suffer if those subsidies expire. Now, everybody really understands what that would have entailed. There were tons of news articles and all kinds of reporting about that. And a lot of people were quite, quite concerned, even within and especially, in fact, within many Republican districts. And so this became an issue in the last, in our elections on November 4th. OK, but people now know, but the measures still went through, didn't they? That's true. They did go through and they will come up again because they are due to expire. So this is a fight that, you know, there is a battle that has been completed, but a war that is ongoing. Why do you think these Democratic rebels caved? Well, there's undoubtedly a lot of reasons, but the most obvious is the amount of pain that this was causing average Americans, combined with the fact that Trump seemed unlikely to budge. And every day that this went on, there were not only, as you mentioned, hundreds of thousands of federal workers who were not getting paid, but many, many millions of Americans who were suffering from losing benefits, in particular, as your reporting mentioned again, access to food that they desperately needed. So, you know, a combination of pain being caused, very palpable, very serious pain to millions of Americans, combined with the fact that Trump just seemed unwilling to budge, made the calculations clearly for, you know, seven plus one senators to decide that there was just there was no point in going forward, that nothing was going to change. And it's interesting that you frame it in that way, because, of course, the pain was being felt across the United States. It wasn't Republican senators who changed their mind. It was Democratic senators. So why do you believe that the Democrats felt the pain greater than the Republicans? Well, I'll leave that for your listeners to decide why it is that Republicans seemed more insensitive to the pain that this shutdown was causing to millions of Americans than Democrats did. I will point out that, as you said, this pain was not limited to places where Democrats were in control, in Democratic, you know, in districts where Democrats were, you know, the senators and the representatives. This pain was very widespread and there were certainly some Republicans who were indeed grumbling and making clear, you know, behind and not so behind the scenes that this was causing their constituents immense pain. But Trump has very strong control over his party. Nobody wants to cross him openly. I think if Trump had sort of disappeared and gone to sleep for a week, you would have seen, in fact, many Republicans who would have wanted to cave on these subsidies because they know they know that there are many, many people in their own districts who are dependent on them. Where does this deal leave the Democrats, this party of opposition who so far seem to have failed to lay a glove on a president who has scoffed at their every challenge even as he pushes at the limits of his authority? Well, that's an excellent question, because in some sense, the outcome of this war will be decided by the coming midterms. In a way, the fact that these subsidies are due to expire in January means that this issue will come back to the forefront of the political agenda. And it may, in fact, turn out that the Democrats benefit from this electorally because these are extremely popular. There are millions of Americans dependent on them. And those millions of Americans, as I said, are not located exclusively in Democratic districts. So, again, this is a battle. This battle is over. But this war will continue, and in particular, it will come back again at the end of January and in the midterm elections. The U.S. Congress is widely described as dysfunctional and gridlocked. What do you think needs to change? Well, I think that this budget shutdown is just, you know, a kind of very good, and I use that term loosely, indication of how problematic the Congress is. I mean, the Republicans are pretty much in thrall to Trump and the Democrats do not have enough numbers in either of the House or the Senate with the filibuster to push anything through on their own. So you have this kind of very unhealthy dynamic in a way of a Democratic Party that is just blocked numerically from doing very much at the congressional level. And then a Republican Party in Congress that is in thrall to Trump, which basically means that Trump is the agenda center. Trump has all the power. The only way this will change is if increasing numbers of Republican senators and congressmen feel that the things that he is doing represent direct, clear and present dangers to their own electoral futures. Right. So this is a feature. This is not a bug. This is built into the system. We have a popular president who has just about a majority in both houses and a faithful party behind him. That's correct. And as long as this situation stays the way it is, again, Trump will pretty much be able to do what he wants as far as agenda setting for not just the budget, but for a whole variety of other policies. The question is whether these issues around affordability, notice that he used in your clip, you know, make America affordable again rather than great again, because affordability came up as kind of the big issue and the big weakness for Republicans in our recent elections. And so if this continues to play to the Democratic Party strength as opposed to the Republican Party strength, you will see more Republicans openly worried about whether or not maintaining these kinds of policies and, you know, this kind of agenda is going to be good for them. What about this filibuster rule, which has been much discussed that you need 60 votes to pass legislation instead of a simple majority? Does that need changing? Well, this is one of the many curious, I imagine, to Europeans and anti-majoritarian aspects of our system. In many ways, the filibuster is a kind of bizarre feature of American legislative politics. The problem is that senators in neither party really have an incentive to get rid of it because it gives, of course, the minority party some say. It also means that the Senate, therefore, has so much more power even than it might normally have, just because it makes so many things have to get stuck in that chamber. So the problem with getting rid of it is that there's the senators do not themselves seem to want to get rid of it. And that's basically what would be required for that to disappear. It doesn't need to be there. It's not a feature of our constitutional system in any way. Good talking to you. Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Sherry Berman from Barnard College in New York.