Among the mossiest of jokes on Capitol Hill is one that goes something like this:
A freshly elected Democratic member of the House says to one of his elders (the party here depending on who is doing the telling), “Show me a Republican. I want to meet the enemy.”
The Old Bull replies, “Republicans are the opposition, son. The Senate is the enemy.”
Rank-and-file Democrats felt a similar sentiment last week when eight of their number in the Senate voted with the GOP majority to end the longest government shutdown in history.
The deal they struck did not achieve what their party had said was its immovable bottom line, which was to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies set to expire at the end of the year. Without that help paying premiums of the coverage Americans buy on the Obamacare exchanges, Democrats warned, the health care costs for millions will soar.
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, dismissed what they got in return as a “pinkie promise” that the Senate will hold a vote on the question sometime in December. It’s unclear if the extension will get the 60 votes needed in the Senate or even be taken up in the House at all.
It also remains to be seen whether what infuriated Democrats have called a surrender ends up looking more like a strategic retreat. They have elevated the subject of health care — an issue where they enjoy more public trust than the Republicans do. Win or lose, it will be a message they can carry forward into the 2026 midterm elections.
The rift it caused between members of the same party sitting in the two houses of Congress is a familiar one. In fact, these sorts of conflicts were what America’s founders had in mind when they created the legislative branch.
This time, it happened to the Democrats. But in 2017, it was House Republicans’ turn to be furious at their counterparts in the Senate. They passed a measure to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a pared-down version of their own, only to see it fail when it got to the other chamber.
“The Founding Fathers had very specific reasons for creating the two institutions as they did,” said John A. Lawrence, a historian who spent eight years as chief of staff to former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California).
The House, he noted, is “directly elected by a relatively small number of people in a district that has shared interests, serving for a short term, so very responsive to the electorate.”
Senators, on the other hand, are accountable to more diverse constituencies, given that they run statewide. Their six-year terms are three times as long as those of House members, and they are staggered, so that no more than a third of them are on the ballot in any election year.
Then there are the procedures that the Senate designed for itself — most notably, the filibuster, in which 60 votes are required for most legislation to pass. In other words, not much can move without a broad and usually bipartisan consensus, which is also a way the Senate maintains its leverage over the House.
Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, was part of the breakaway faction that put together the deal.
“The rivalry between the House and the Senate and between the Congress and the president is not a bug in the Constitution. It’s the absolute essence of it,” King said in an interview. “The framers wanted it to be cumbersome, slow and difficult to make national policy, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.”
The pain from the shutdown was spreading, and there was no sign that President Donald Trump and the Republicans were going to bend — or even engage with the Democrats. But also of no small concern to the minority party was the fact that Trump was urging the Senate Republican majority to do away with the filibuster to pass GOP-written spending legislation that would reopen the government.
“Was it going to happen in two weeks or a month? I don’t know,” King said. “But I do know, both from private conversations and what’s been in the press, that Trump was and is putting tremendous pressure on the Republicans [to end the filibuster]. He’s telling them he won’t support them in the primary. He’s making it a litmus test for his endorsement for candidates running for the Senate next time.”
Without the Democratic minority having the ability to stop Republican initiatives with a filibuster, King warned, the consequences might include voter suppression laws, a nationwide abortion ban or even the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
“This was not a trivial risk,” King said. “It wasn’t the driving force in my work on this issue, but it was certainly in the back of my mind that we could win the battle and lose the war.”
Nor was it probably a coincidence that the eight Democratic votes in the Senate were exactly the number needed to end the shutdown — or that none of them will be on the ballot next year. King said he believes at least 10 or 15 of his Democratic colleagues who voted no were actually hoping the deal to end the shutdown would pass.
“I’ll be waiting at Christmas time for my thank you note,” King joked. “But yeah, everybody has to do what they have to do.”
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