Listen to Lawrence: '271 Republicans caved to the demands of five Democrats" [View all]

Lawrence: With Trump's shutdown ending, Dems are closer than ever to forcing Epstein files release

(excerpt)

___ The end of the government shutdown was forged when five Senate Democrats, and only five, changed their position in a compromise that forced every Senate Republican to change their positions - while it also forced Donald Trump to change his position - and it has forced every Republican member of the House of Representatives to now change their positions.

So this is five Democrats who changed their position
and 53 Republican senators, 217 Republican House members, and one Republican president. A total of 271
Republicans who changed their positions and are now
supporting a version of a budget bill that they said they would never support, and, five Democrats who changed their position to vote for that same bill which was proposed by those five Democrats.

So who caved here? What does caved mean?

But this being Washington, the five changed votes on the Democratic side versus the 271 Republicans changing
their position is being generally reported as the Democrats, meaning all of them, the Democrats abandoning their position. the Democrats caving, the Democrats losing the shutdown.

So, five Democrats changed their position. 271 Republicans changed their position to arrive at a compromised position. And it's reported as just the Democrats caving.

Now, if we want to use the word cave in place of the word compromise, 271 Republicans, including Donald Trump, caved to just five Democrats, not eight, just five because three Democrats were already voting with the Republicans on this.

271 Republicans changed their position to accept the demands of five Democrats that created the 60 vote majority in the Senate to pass a bill. And what did those Democrats achieve?

Well, those five Democrats forced Republicans, including Donald Trump, who's been trying to stop funding supplemental nutritional assistance, to increase funding for food stamps. Increase it. That is not nothing.

The five Democrats who changed their position managed to not just guarantee supplemental nutrition assistance
funding for almost a year, but they actually got it increased. And no Republican wanted to do that.

Donald Trump didn't want to do that. No Republicans wanted that. So, they caved, if that's the word we're going to use, on that. The Republicans did. And all the Republicans are caving to that demand by those five Democrats for their votes.

That's one of the things the five Democrats got for their votes. The five Democrats also obtained a guarantee to rehire every federal worker Donald Trump has fired during the government shutdown. Every one of them. 4,000 people will get their jobs back. and they will get back pay because of this compromise that five Senate Democrats forced on 271 Republicans, including Donald Trump.

The compromise also forces Donald Trump to deliver back pay to all federal workers, every one of them affected by the Trump shutdown, something Donald Trump was trying to avoid. Donald Trump was trying to become the first president in history to deny back pay to every government worker affected by the shutdown.
And those five Democratic senators got that back pay guaranteed. That is not nothing.

They got something. Something. They didn't get what they wanted. They didn't get everything. They didn't get
the big thing. They got something.

It should not be surprising that one of the five senators in this compromise is Tim Kaine of Virginia, where he represents one of the states with the most federal government workers per capita working in and around Washington DC.

It should also not be surprising that both of the Democratic senators from Nevada joined the compromise that will avoid the airport nightmares that were looming in America for Thanksgiving and Christmas if the shutdown continues. Las Vegas, Nevada is completely dependent onreliable air traffic into Las Vegas to feed the local economy, the biggest economy in Nevada. Las Vegas has other problems now with Canadians boycotting tourism in America. But the airport nightmare was something that Nevada's Dem senators decided after 40 days they simply could not abide.

For people in government who care about how the government works and how the country runs which does not include Donald Trump - people who care about that, including our air traffic control system, for them, government shutdowns are actually painful every day. They're not a stunt. They're not a tactic. They're not a
strategic tactic. They are painful.

Government shutdowns are full of pressure every day for people who care about this government actually running and running well. And that pressure of a government shutdown gets greater every day.

Some people who have never been in the room with a senator feeling that pressure seem to think that it's easy
for senators from Nevada to do nothing to end the government shutdown that is ruining American air travel.

People who have never seen or heard a majority or
minority leader of the Senate actually try to persuade a senator on how to vote seem to think that it's easy.

If you haven't worked in the Senate, you haven't actually seen it happen. It is not televised. It happens on the Senate floor when the senators are speaking privately and don't have microphones. It happens in the leader office just off the Senate floor. And it happens in the Mansfield room and the LBJ room just off the Senate floor.

Those rooms were named for previous Senate majority leaders who were thought to be masters of the Senate. Democratic senators meet in the LBJ room. The minority party meets in the LBJ room for their group lunches. The
majority party meets in the Mansfield room for their group lunches.

No reporter,no pundit who claims expertise in this
arena has ever been allowed in one of those rooms while those meetings were happening. No authors of books about political science have ever been allowed in those rooms. They have no idea what it's like for a Democratic leader of the Senate trying to guide every Democrat in
the Senate in a room together at the same time.

Very few Senate staffers are ever allowed in that room. There are usually no more than two or three staffers in that room. I was in that room many times in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was president and a masterful Senate majority leader, George Mitchell of Maine, was running
that room.

There was a moment in those early Clinton years in that room when it seemed that the only reason two senators
didn't start throwing punches is that they were seated too far apart from each other when they were yelling at each other.

They were two men who fully respected each other, were very friendly with each other, usually voted the same way, but that day almost came to blows because that's how tense it can be in that room. And that is how important the work is. Those two senators had conflicting
opinions that day. And both of them thought that what they wanted to do was the best thing for the country.

That was not an egotistical shouting match. That was a shouting match about the future of this country. A shouting match about what this country needed at
that moment. And luckily at that moment,the most tense moment I've ever seen in that room, in the Mansfield room, John Glenn was in the room.

John Glenn was in the room that day, a veteran Navy
combat pilot who was the first person to orbit the Earth as an astronaut. He was a hero to everyone in that room long before any of us ever met him. and in a soft voice, he calmed the room and got everyone back on track trying to figure out how to work together.

The Senate is lucky when it has giants like John Glenn in the room, worldclass heroes who command everyone's admiration all the time. But Senator John Glenn was not a leader. He was never a leader. I never heard a senator say, "I'm voting for it because John Glenn is voting for it."

There is no more difficult thing to try to do in the United States Senate. Very few senators have ever been able to
do it either at the committee level or at the majority minority leader level. The Republican leaders of the Senate during the Trump era have not commanded party discipline. Fear of Trump voters in their states is what has commanded party discipline by Republicans in the
Senate. Every Republican senator fears what will happen to them if they don't do what Donald Trump tells their voters in their states that they should do.

The Democrats have never had an enforcer like that and never will.

Chuck Schumer now has the impossible job of what the great George Mitchell and other majority leaders used to call herding cats. George Mitchell didn't mean that as an insult to Democratic senators. He meant that as a description of the degree of difficulty and complexity of trying to lead the United States Senate. It's like herding cats.

Most outside observers have come to believe, it seems, that it's easy. that Chuck Schumer has easy decisions to make. Clear, simple, easy, black and white. And that may be because Chuck Schumer made the job look too easy.

As the Senate majority leader during the Biden presidency, Chuck Schumer pulled off the most significant string of 50 vote victories in the United States
Senate that we have ever seen. Chuck Schumer did not have a majority of United States senators.

Chuck Schumer was the leader of a 50/50 Senate for
longer than any other leader in the history of the Senate. And Chuck Schumer could only get to 51 votes with Vice
President Harris casting the tiebreaking 51st vote. But his legislative accomplishments during the Biden presidency and President Biden's legislative accomplishments were greater, especially when you consider the degree of difficulty than any other president and any other Senate leader of our lifetimes.

When Lyndon Johnson was the majority leader of the United States Senate, no one at the time considered him a master of the Senate because Lyndon Johnson had 65 Democrats on his side of the Senate. The legendary Mike
Mansfield, the longest serving majority leader, had 68 Democrats in the Senate.

With Lyndon Johnson as president and Mike Mansfield as the majority leader, they passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 with 73 votes with more than two dozen Republicans voting for the Civil Rights Act. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson as president and Mike Mansfield as Senate majority leader passed the Voting Rights Act with 77 votes. And 30 of those votes were from Republicans.

That was an easier job than any day of Chuck Schumer's job. Lyndon Johnson, the so-called master of the Senate, had no idea what budget reconciliation was because it did not exist until a year after Lynden Johnson died. The Senate became dramatically more complex procedurally in 1974 when the budget act was passed that created the Senate Budget Committee and the House Budget Committee and the complex parliamentary rules of budgeting that have created the budget reconciliation process. A process that Lynden Johnson would have found maddening, a process far more complex than the most difficult parliamentary challenges that ever faced Mike Mansfield or Lyndon Johnson when they served as majority leader.

Chuck Schumer lives and breathes those complexities and no one in the news media truly understands them. It is impossible to understand the workings of an institution when the most delicate operations of that institution are conducted behind closed doors. In the Mansfield room, the LBJ room, the Senate offices, the leader's office, never in front of cameras.

Chuck Schumer voted against the compromise that five members of his party negotiated. The Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, is also against that compromise.

Mike Johnson is a huge loser in this compromise because Mike Johnson's bill that he passed through the House of Representatives by five votes is not going to be signed into law. It's going to be ripped up.

Mike Johnson has to bring all of his Republican House members back and all of them all of them have to change their positions to agree with just five Senate Democrats
who changed their positions.

And when Mike Johnson does that, the Epstein files come back to life in the House of Representatives. Because when Mike Johnson convenes the House of Representatives, he will have to swear in the newest elected member of the House of Representatives, Adelita Grialva of Arizona. She will then immediately become the 218th signature on a discharge petition that will force a vote of the House of Representatives on releasing the Epstein files. A vote Mike Johnson fears more than any vote ever cast during his speakerhip.

That is why Mike Johnson closed down the House of Representatives and gave every Republican in the House a paid vacation for the last seven weeks. Fear, abject fear of the Epstein files...

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