General Discussion

I have to agree on many of your points. I am convinced that Trump would never have caved. He exults in punishing people. And he HATES most Americans, especially Democrats.

My niece is an air traffic controller. She and her husband have two children ages two and four. At the end of October she had to take a day off work to arrange loans, talk to creditors, and figure out which bills they could afford to wait on. With the responsibility of lives in her hands, she did not take a day off lightly but out of desperation. She and all the air traffic controllers were working shorthanded which means extra-long hours and being required to work six days a week quite often. She couldn't take a paying job as a gig worker because of those long hours. They were really headed to a breaking point.

Then there's my disabled friend Natalie who survives on an income of $967 and for whom SNAP is the difference between making it and otherwise. I've bought a lot of groceries for her in the last couple of weeks after learning she was skipping meals, which she can't afford to do because of the medication she is on and the toll it takes on her health. It wasn't sustainable. And by helping her to the extent I was, I couldn't also easily send my niece and her husband money or step up what we give to our local food bank.

Most Democrats in Congress had to be aware that Trump is psychopathic and can't be counted on to negotiate an end to it, especially since it fit with Project 2025 to destroy both ACA and SNAP.

All they had were awful choices. Ending the shutdown now to prevent adults, seniors, and children from starving now, forced into bankruptcy, possibly losing their homes, and the trauma that economic upheaval causes to families and marriages. Or skyrocketing insurance premiums with many losing health insurance, some with pre-existing conditions, medical bankruptcies, some with losing their homes. They ended the one that involved starvation and got huge attention on the skyrocketing premiums as well as the Big Ugly Bill and its consequences. I feel for them. This kind of moral dilemma is devastating to have to consider, with no least bad options.