A Democrat senator who helped keep the shutdown alive is now admitting what the rest of his party won’t say out loud: they caved because their strategy completely fell apart.
Sen. Angus King told reporters he backed the compromise funding deal for one blunt reason — “it wasn’t working.”
He acknowledged Democrats went from having “zero chance” of getting their ACA subsidy demands to maybe “50/50,” and only after abandoning their shutdown pressure campaign.
A reporter pressed him on the fallout:
“How do you explain that to your constituents, why it was worth it to put up this fight for so long, when in the end, you did not get your key demand?”
SEN. KING:
“Because it wasn’t working. How long would it take to not get a response to say it isn’t working?”
He admitted Republicans never budged.
“In other words, it’s been six weeks. The Republicans made it clear they weren’t going to discuss the health care issue. The Affordable Care Act, tax credits until until the shutdown was over.”
“We tried to keep working that for six weeks. It didn’t happen. The vote that we have is not a guarantee for sure.”
“Here’s the way I would put it. As I assessed it, there was zero chance of dealing with the ACA issue as long as the shutdown continued.”
King was blunt about the reality Democrats faced:
“Now, I don’t know, 50/50, but there’s a lot better chance now than there was this morning because the nothing was happening and there was no evidence that another week or another two weeks or Thanksgiving or Christmas was suddenly the Republicans want to come to us and say, oh, we want to now talk about the ACA.”
In the end, it was all just theater.
However, Senator King delivered a rare moment of honesty — and a devastating indictment of his own party’s strategy.
A brutal confession that the Democrats’ shutdown leverage is gone.
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