'What Are You Willing to Fight For?': Democrats' Depressing New Reality

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/the-democrats-depressing-new-reality/383708/

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To the very limited extent that congressional Democrats have enjoyed the last four years of gridlock on Capitol Hill, they have derived pleasure from watching the Republican Party rupture over and over again, its divisions between the conservative Tea Party and the establishment leadership preventing just about any real legislative accomplishments.

As afternoon turned to evening on Thursday, it was the Democrats who were turning on each other. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senator Elizabeth Warren, the liberal darling, railed against a White House-backed spending deal that narrowly passed the House just a couple hours before a midnight deadline for keeping the government open. During a marathon, closed-door meeting in the Capitol basement, Democrats debated two key questions: whether a pair of onerous giveaways for Wall Street and wealthy donors in a $1 trillion bill were cause for shutting down the government, and whether they could get a better deal from Republicans by rejecting this one.

"It does not get better," Representative Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who voted for the bill, said on Friday morning. "There were a number of us that respectfully had a different point of view that we didn’t have the kind of leverage that Elizabeth Warren was suggesting." He was referring to the spending package, but he could have been talking about his party's prospects as a whole in 2015. Come January, Republicans will run not just the House but also the Senate, and the debates among Democrats about exactly how far they should retreat will become familiar. In lobbying for the bill, which is expected to pass the Senate either Friday or in the coming days, the White House highlighted increased funding to fight Ebola and for regulatory agencies like the FCC, but officials focused just as much on what the Republicans didn't gut, namely Obamacare, the president's climate plan, and his immigration policy. That, too, will become the norm.

Tempers peaked after the administration formally endorsed the legislation Thursday afternoon, just as Democratic opposition was building. Taking to the House floor, Pelosi assailed Obama's support for the bill and said Democrats had been "blackmailed." Despite her denunciation, Pelosi's office insisted she was not lobbying her members against the proposal. So, was she trying to torpedo the bill, or did she merely want to send a message to Republicans and the president that Democrats couldn't be taken for granted? "I did not get the impression that Leader Pelosi was simply trying to make a point," Connolly said. "I got the strong impression that she was urging the caucus to vote down the bill."