As urgent and calamitous as missed paychecks and missed SNAP benefits are *right now*

so the missed ACA subsidies will be ongoing through the next election.

The distress that people are experiencing, which those "making a deal" are claiming to assuage, will be created -- albeit in a slightly different form but fundamentally the same -- by this deal and it will persist, every day, between now and the next election and beyond.

So after a bunch of tough talk in an admittedly winless situation, the chosen path of all the bad options was... the appearance of fecklessness.

And people wonder why elections are lost even though the stated policies poll so well individually.