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Hi friends,
If you haven’t seen, Senate Democrats surrendered. What I am about to write may sound calm and collected, but know that I am channeling my searing hot incandescent rage in an effort to explain what went down, and what it requires of all of us next.
1. This was a surrender.
We didn’t just get a “bad deal” -- we got essentially nothing. The original Dem demands were threefold:
- Permanent extension of the ACA subsidies
- Medicaid funding restored
- No more blank checks for the regime (rescission/impoundment restrictions)
Democrats dropped the Medicaid funding demands immediately after making them. They then stopped talking about rescission and impoundment. They dropped from “permanent” to “multi-year” to, finally, “one year” of ACA subsidies this week. A one-year extension -- Schumer's offer on Friday -- is actually the same demand as front-line Republican House members scared about reelection. But they couldn’t even hold the line there -- they surrendered without even getting that.
2. The vote itself was a bit of Kabuki theater.
Conveniently for them, none of the eight Senate Dems who voted for this are up for reelection next year. That’s by design. There’s going to be a lot of well-deserved anger directed at those specific eight Dems, but make no mistake -- this vote was stage-managed.
The way this works is that a critical mass of Dems within the caucus decides they’re going to surrender, they look at the number of votes they need to do it (eight), and they agree on eight Dems who don’t have to face voters anytime soon. That’s why Senators like Mark Warner can vote against it, even though they were widely known to be drivers behind the surrender.
This is not true of literally every Senate Dem -- we know that a bunch of folks, like Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Van Hollen were arguing strongly against it behind closed doors. But many who voted no publicly helped engineer this surrender privately.
3. Schumer and Dem Senate leadership broadly failed.
Chuck Schumer, Brian Schatz, and Kirsten Gillibrand all voted for the March surrender, but voted against this surrender. Is that a meaningful shift? No.
Even aside from the Kabuki theater aspect of all this, it's the leadership's job to unify the Dem caucus to fight the fascists. That’s it. Their individual votes are irrelevant. If the Dem caucus fractures and fails to unify against the Bad Republican Bill, then that’s a failure of both the individual senators who caved and leadership for failing to lead the caucus.
We do not know now and will never know for sure if Schumer orchestrated this (my suspicion) or if he simply lacked the leadership skills to prevent it (also possible). But we don’t have to know the reason -- it is just factually true that he and the rest of the leadership team failed to hold their own caucus together.
Combine #3 with #2 above, and it leads here: If you’ve got a Senate Dem who is not calling for new leadership, they’re part of the problem. We should no longer trust Senate Dems who decline to come out against the leadership that led us here. Until proven otherwise, we should assume they were in on the game to fool their own supporters. It is easy to disabuse us of that assumption -- they just have to publicly make the popular call for new leadership.
4. This is bad policy.
The Republican budget guarantees that healthcare premiums will continue to skyrocket, rural hospitals will close, more people will go without healthcare, and more people will die. It does nothing to stop Trump from treating the federal budget as his personal piggybank.
The “win” some Dems are claiming is bullshit. They got a pinky-promise agreement from Republicans for a vote on ACA subsidies 40 days from now. They do not have the votes to win on that with serious concessions in both the House and Senate. It’s fake.
5. This is bad politics.
Senate Democrats surrendered when they had maximum leverage and were winning the fight. This surrender came weeks after the largest protest in American history, and days after the best election night in a decade or more. The public opinion polling showed Democrats were winning the fight, and the party’s own approval ratings were rising in response to them keeping up the fight.
We know where Indivisibles were on this. We polled them after last week’s "What’s the Plan?"call asking if Dems should take a GOP deal to reopen the government, or if they should continue fighting for ACA subsidies. 98.67% wanted to continue the fight!
This week, for the first time all year, Democrats were riding high. The regime was on the ropes. We had just clobbered them last Tuesday -- crushing the regime electorally everywhere. To surrender now is a message to all rank-and-file Democrats: "We don’t care that you want us to fight." I agreed with Brian Beutler’s take last night: the surrender in March felt like a reflection of “poor morale and low self-confidence.” This surrender is “throwing the fight.”
If the Senate leadership’s goal was to demobilize and depress rank-and-file Democrats, they could not have played their cards better.
6. The surrender will embolden the regime to do more damage.
The threat from Trump and Republicans is real and existential. They are violently attacking our communities, looting our services to serve their billionaire buddies, and shredding the Constitution. They’re behaving like they won’t ever be out of power again, because that’s their plan. There is nothing more urgent than ensuring they do not succeed.
By surrendering so utterly and completely at a moment of their maximum leverage and momentum, Senate Democrats teach Trump and his cadre an important lesson: do enough damage, and your opponents will buckle. This is an extremely dangerous lesson for Trump to learn as he ramps up his attacks on blue states and cities and prepares to steal the midterm elections. Because of this surrender, our democracy is more imperiled now than it was before.
7. The only path to a real opposition party is through a cleansing primary season.
We have spent a year now trying to convince the Democratic Party to unify and fight back. It started as a lonely fight shortly after the election, but our numbers grew. We’ve seen some Democrats lead from the beginning, some come around, and some do their best to at least perform resistance. There’s been real progress -- in large part because of our collective work.
But at some point, you gotta either change your leaders’ minds or you gotta change your leaders. And the time for changing minds is over.
After this week, we should expect more fecklessness unless we demand a change. You don’t demand that change in a general election -- you do it in primaries. And conveniently, primaries are right around the corner.
This all leads to one big announcement. Today, Indivisible is launching the largest Democratic primary program we’ve ever run.
This isn’t about left vs right. This is about fighting back vs losing. The regime’s threats are too real and the stakes are too high to settle for the feckless, loser version of the Democratic Party we saw this week. As we head into the midterms next year, we need a Democratic Party that inspires and instills pride. In this moment when the fascists are on the march, we need a Democratic Party with a spine.
Our primary program will include both the House and Senate. We will work with Indivisible groups to identify key races, provide support on the ground, and tap into movement energy across the country to boost candidates with a spine. One thing we can say for sure: We will not back any Senate primary candidate unless they call for Schumer to step down as Majority Leader.
And after the primary, whatever happens, we will rally behind the winner, and crush the regime electorally in the midterms just like we did this last week.
There will be much more to announce soon, but here are a few things we’ll ask you to do right now:
- If you’re as pissed as I am and this all resonates with you, sign up to be part of this campaign to rebuild the Democratic Party today.
- If you’ve got a Democratic Representative in the House, call them today and tell them not to be a party to this surrender -- or we’ll remember it next year. Yes, Republicans can likely pass this through the House without Democratic votes, but Dems don’t need to make it easier for them or put their names on a bill that betrays their constituents.
- If you’re raring to do even more, you can also chip in to help us get this primary project off the ground. We’re going to be counting on grassroots supporters to fund this, but there will be many, many ways to get involved, so only give if you can.
We get the party we demand, and we intend to demand one that fights -- a Democratic Party with a spine.
In solidarity,
Ezra Levin
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible 
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