The Democrats were furious Monday over eight senators who caved to support a deal to end the government shutdown that does not include the Affordable Care Act subsidies their party had spent weeks fighting for.
The offending lawmakers include Democratic Senators Dick Durbin, Tim Kaine, Jacky Rosen, John Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, and independent Senator Angus King, who claimed that they’d ensured a Senate vote on extending the tax credits. Their capitulation comes after House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted for weeks that he wouldn’t promise them a vote on anything, and even if he does follow through with a vote, it’s unlikely such a measure will pass the House.
Democratic lawmakers slammed their colleagues for forfeiting health care coverage for an estimated 5.1 million Americans by 2034 and increasing premiums across the marketplace.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders railed against the deal while speaking before the Senate Sunday. “If this vote succeeds, over 20 million Americans are gonna see at least a doubling in their premiums in the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “For certain groups of people, it will be a tripling and a quadrupling of their premiums. There are people who will now be paying 50 percent of their limited incomes for health care. Does anybody in the world think that makes sense?”
Somebody pointed out last night that it’s no coincidence that it was exactly 8 senators and conveniently none of them are up for reelection in 2026… It’s enough to make one wonder which other senators also need to be primaried even though they flew under the radar.
It also won’t be a coincidence when they’re seen sailing their new yachts.
They even slipped into the bill that any senator who was investigated by the DOJ under Biden will get a $500k payout from our tax dollars. Schumer and McConnell are probably popping a bottle of champaign together right now.
Only 13 Dem senators are up for re-election in 2026, so I don’t think its that surprising that none of the 8 that voted for this aren’t.
I would say it’s more surprising that
Any Dems caved at this point before at least seeing how the showdown between Trump and the courts would play out.
There have been a lot of fingers pointed at Schumer for his lack of leadership in uniting the party. While I think there’s more than enough to criticize him for (being so shitty about Mamdani, especially during the shutdown being the first and foremost thing I would say shows poor leadership), I have to say I’m holding off immediately jumping to that conclusion.
It may be true, and even though I don’t really trust Schumer in many ways, the reason I hesitate to immediately jump on the bandwagon in this case is because of the specific Democrat that was the first to start parroting this narrative, and has continued to parrot it as loudly as possible since last night.
I read this article around midnight last night:
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/trump-takes-aim-obamacare-historic-federal-shutdown-hits-40th-day-2025-11-09/
I hesitate to trust Schumer because it seems like he has reached a point in his career where he (along with many establishment Dems) is too quick to sell out core values. However, I do think Schumer honestly may have held those values at one point in his career, but became too comfortable with the status quo.
On the other hand, Ro Kahnna has no values. He was never supposed to be trusted in the first place, and when I see the media refer to him as a progressive it makes my fucking blood boil. He exists to serve the interests of Peter Thiel, and his own interests/Palantir investments, by keeping Thiel rich and happy.
Broken clocks and what not, so he could be right in this instance. However, knowing how Theil uses the media to manipulate public opinion, and this sneaky mother fucking snake in the grass, being the first to already have that narrative ready to go from the jump, and the media being so quick to help him spread it, makes me suspicious as hell.
What reason did those 3 senators possibly have to suddenly cave, and broker that deal on Sunday fucking night after we went into the weekend with the very public back and forth on SNAP?
And then for the other 5 to join them voting for it. It’s clear where Fetterman’s loyalty lies, but the other 7 Democrats that voted for this seriously couldn’t just wait for the public to know that the circuit court sided with the original ruling to pay SNAP in full? Why is that?
There are only 48, right? And of those 13 are up for re-election. That’s better than 1 in 4. To look at 8 defectors and none of them be up seems… Highly coincidental at best.
For this to happen by pure chance, that 8 randomly selected people from a group of 48 includes none of the 13 that are up for re-election, the odds are 6.2%. Not impossible but unlikely enough to doubt it’s a coincidence.
(For math people: this can be modeled as a hypergeometric distribution with N=48, K=13, n=8, k=0.)
I suspect most people haven’t heard these terms. But they should have studied basic combinatorics in high school, and that’s all it really is. You had a pool of 48 people from whom to choose 8, but you happened to choose them from the specific pool of 35 not up for reelection. So the likelihood of that happening randomly is just 35 choose 8 / 48 choose 8, which is indeed 6.2%.
its probably those 13, schumer is shielding.
Simple random samples (uniform probability for each individual) without replacement follow the hypergeometric distribution. However, humans aren’t random, know when they go up for re-election, and decide accordingly, so the probability for each individual is not uniform. We could expect a much higher probability for this outcome than that of a simple random sample.
I ran the numbers on the “purely random” scenario, and it’s a 5.77% chance that none of 8 randomly selected from a group of 47 would be from a subgroup of 13 (34/47 * 33/46 * 32/45…)
I ran them again under the Totally Accurate Wild Guess of those 13 being 3 times as likely to cave as the others, and the odds of all 8 being from that set is 34.4%.
Ramping it up to 10 times as likely, 71.5%.
The 50% mark happens around 4.73 times as likely.
None of these numbers are meant to convince anyone of anything, they’re just provided for whatever anyone wants them for.
That’s exactly my point. :)
Dems caving isn’t surprising in the slightest. Infuriating, sure, but absolutely never surprising.
It’s why I’m so disgusted about the one thing they didn’t cave on.
I think your interpretation about Schumer’s actions just doesn’t match reality. Presumably he doesn’t control those eight people, but he does have inside knowledge, and he could have framed things differently. If the Democrats had gone public with several plans first and then they caved, then it might have been understandable. If Schumer is a leader with any power whatsoever, he should have set that up when he realized that he was going to lose support from those 8 senators. Or if he’s a leader without any power, then he’s not actually a leader and he needs to remove himself from that position.
I think we know exactly what he was doing because we’ve seen him act this way before. so if it looks like he’s flaking out again then probably that’s what happened. Of course our intuition is not proof, but we don’t need proof.
What interpretation about Schumer’s actions? My point is not that I trust Schumer. It’s that I trust Ro Kahnna even less because I know who controls him.
Rep. Ro Khanna’s Financial Disclosures Show Investments in Palantir the Tech Company Building Immigration Tool
I don’t know why else Kahnna would be ready to go on a 24 hour press junket calling for Schumer to be ousted immediately after it was publicly announced Democrats had caved. And I don’t know why one of the earliest Democrats who turned, and helped draft the deal with Republicans, would then go on Fox News first thing this morning to claim Schumer was in on it the whole time.
I don’t give a fuck what moral high ground anyone wants to take regarding what Schumer has done. I’m not denying he needs to be replaced, but I don’t trust the way it’s happening. Using the press to manipulate the public and orchestrate a coup is the go to playbook of the same opportunist who recently publicly stated we all just need to accept that an authoritarian surveillance state may be inevitable in order for the U.S. to beat China in the AI race.
If Thiel has decided Schumer needs to be removed so suddenly, it’s not because he wants to help the democratic party and replace him with a more progressive leader.
All of them. There should be repercussions of allowing our elected representatives to fall into such a dysfunctional state as to shut down the government.
Make them all earn their jobs back, as it’s clear they are ineffectual as-is.
In a few countries, that happens automatically, or dissolutions or resignations happen by convention.
no cofidence vote, trigger new elections, or dissolves the current government. USA will never go for this.
This was setup no way leadership didn’t know about this. It fucking show and they should pay for this betrayal.
schumer is protecting probably another 7 or 8, we already schumer is a dino, hes also safe. just have to look at whos getting re-electe d in the '26 elections.
Wasn’t that the point of “Force the Vote”? So we know who the snakes are and they can’t hide behind the assholes who are retiring?