All that’s really left at this point is for someone to make up some merch for congressional Democrats that says, “We shut down the government for more than 40 days, and all we got was this lousy T-shirt.”

From the beginning, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) was one of the few Democrats who rightly argued against inflicting pain on Americans in an effort to cajole Republicans into addressing skyrocketing health insurance premiums. Unfortunately, it took more than 40 days for a small handful of her Democratic colleagues in the Senate to form a similar opinion. 

In exchange for a pinky-promise from Senate Republicans to hold a future vote on expiring Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies, eight Senate Democrats banded together to finally put an end to the longest government shutdown in American history. The result is that we’re pretty much right back where we started more than a month ago, with a looming health care crisis on the horizon, Biden-era spending levels continuing for the near future and Republicans being noncommittal about actually solving any real problems. 

Judging by the initial reaction from the party’s base, those eight Democrats had better batten down the hatches and prepare for the sort of outrage that so often accompanies genuine acts of political pragmatism nowadays. 

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, for example, unleashed a profanity-infused rant about how those capitulating senators “squandered the leverage” that had been gained by Democrats during the shutdown. “They sapped their voters’ enthusiasm, and snapped defeat from the jaws of victory,” Stewart said in an opening monologue this week.

But here’s the thing. That “leverage” wasn’t some abstract, internal, Capitol Hill political advantage — it was actual pain felt by millions of Americans. What Democratic insiders and partisan loyalists saw as leverage, the rest of us saw as delayed or canceled flights, unpaid bills, missed paychecks, empty grocery carts and hungry children. 

The so-called “leverage” Democrats were hoping to wield against Republicans wasn’t theoretical for millions of Americans, it was their personal suffering. 

As is always the case in politics, however, the partisan finger-pointing is only intensifying. In an interview with The Nevada Independent, Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) described cruelty as “a feature, not a bug” of this administration’s response to the last 40 days of gridlock. 

“So, (President Donald Trump) decides to take babies and children, 42 million Americans on SNAP — an overwhelming majority, children, seniors, disabled and veterans — and take food out of their mouths,” she told The Indy after eventually joining Cortez Masto in voting to reopen the government. “He wants to see children starve.”

To be sure, the assertion that Republicans seemed eager to make the effects of the shutdown as painful as possible has some teeth to it. However, whatever cruelty Rosen ascribes to her partisan adversaries was only made possible by her own party’s decision to deliberately risk the funding for such critical programs in a bid to gain “leverage” for an unrelated (albeit critical) looming policy issue. 

After all, the risk of Americans suffering as a consequence of a shutdown wasn’t some unforeseeable eventuality — it was literally the entire point. Democrats were, strategically and deliberately, willing to hold government funding hostage to advance their political agenda because, as a minority party, they lacked the votes to do so through ordinary congressional methods. 

Yes, addressing health care costs is an important issue as premiums are set to skyrocket for millions of Americans. However, as Cortez Masto put it, that should have always been considered a separate issue from passing basic funding to keep the government open. And if the GOP doesn’t partner with Democrats to address the oncoming crisis, Republicans will undoubtedly “own” that policy failure and face the political backlash.

Shutting down the government for well over a month did nothing to change that political calculus. 

And that’s what made the shutdown so nonsensical in the first place. Inflicting pain on Americans to coax Republicans into sparing Americans more pain on a separate issue is ludicrous in any environment — especially if, as Rosen asserts, Republicans are more than willing to “see children starve.” 

Advancing their preferred health care fix, however, wasn’t the only goal for Democrats. As Stewart suggested, much of the motivation behind Democratic obstinance was to show a frustrated progressive base that Senate Democrats are not entirely impotent with a Trumpian Republican majority running Capitol Hill. 

Indeed, it’s no coincidence that every single one of the senators who decided to buck their party and side with Republicans this week are not up for re-election next year. Democratic senators who risk primary challengers from the far left were obviously not nearly as keen to compromise with the majority party. 

Rosen and others like her might feel righteous in highlighting what they describe as the “cruelty” of Republicans during the last 40 days, but her party was the one that deliberately and intentionally put the well-being of Americans at risk for the sake of political strategy. 

That’s an approach to policymaking that is hard to describe as anything other than cruel in its own right — and now that it’s all over, nobody even has a lousy novelty T-shirt to show for all the trouble. 

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him on Twitter @schausmichael or on Substack @creativediscourse.