Perhaps Chuck Schumer sees something we don’t. The game of chess he’s playing is indeed three-dimensional and Mitch McConnell’s Republican majority really is on the ropes, ready to cut that deal and fulfill every West Wing fantasy of savvy, sane bipartisan deal-making.

If so, we can all someday apologize to Schumer for how we yelled into the phones of his office, deluged him with mail, and filled our Twitter streams with invective. We can go pay our respects to the great Senate minority leader.

Key players in the US government shutdown: who came out on top? Read more

But “someday” isn’t here, and as of 23 January 2018, Schumer’s Democratic Senate looks cowardly and inept to the people most invested in the party’s future. Schumer chose to end the government shutdown without a deal to protect undocumented immigrants. He chose to trust McConnell because the Kentucky Republican promised an immigration vote in the coming weeks.

The disconcerting truth about minority leader Schumer – and a future leader of the Senate, if this blue wave crests high enough – is that he comes from another world and has yet to adjust to this one.

There are no serious political consequences for shutting down a government. Republicans did it in 2013, won the Senate in 2014 and the presidency two years later. Arsonists win.

Obstructionism for a moral purpose is noble. Obstructionism for the sake of obstruction – the Republican way under much of Barack Obama’s presidency – is nihilistic.

The progressive wing of the Democratic party and the senators who chose to stand for the Dreamers understand this truth. They know trusting Donald Trump’s Republican party is absurd. They know what they are dealing with.

McConnell is the same majority leader who broke precedent to deny Obama the right to appoint a supreme court justice in the final year of his presidency. Reviled, rightfully so, by both progressives and institutionalists, McConnell could only laugh. He was the boss and he could make his own rules.

Institutions and norms, for the most part, are constructs of who holds power. They can be erased with enough willpower. Before Trump became president, the hard-right faction that now rules the GOP learned this lesson well. Why compromise when you don’t have to?

For years, national Republicans have battled mercilessly for the rights of oligarchs and the incineration of the social safety net. They have been successful because they have done away with decorum and seen politics for what it is, at its bloody core: a power struggle among interest groups.

If you aren’t winning, you’re losing. For DC insiders addicted to a favor-trading ideal that no longer exists, this is hard to fathom. The stakes are low for them. They aren’t immigrants, they aren’t Dreamers, they aren’t living in mortal fear of the police.

Republicans know you can shut down the government or block a supreme court justice and still walk away with everything you want. Trump’s presidency is shambolic, but it’s not entirely unsuccessful: if Neil Gorsuch meets the average life expectancy of a male in America today, he will be serving on the supreme court in the 2040s.

Schumer doesn’t get it. Americans are rightfully desperate: for employment, for affordable healthcare, for a life worth living.

Would voters have blamed Democrats or Republicans more for the shutdown? If Democrats could protect the Dreamers and solve this crisis once and for all with the little leverage they had, does it really matter?

Even from a horse race standpoint, Schumer failed. In this media environment, with Trump labeling countries “shitholes” and a porn star kissing and telling about her affair with the president-to-be, will a government shutdown in January register with voters in November? All signs point to a Democratic wave: a deeply unpopular president, a midterm election and an energized opposition. Schumer could have driven a much harder bargain.

Republicans certainly would have. It’s why they run America – and Schumer’s Democrats don’t.

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