In a spectacular act of cowardice and idiocy last night, seven Democratic Party senators and one independent voted to end the shutdown on Republicans’ terms, squandering their momentum and leverage. Bernie Sanders laid out the likely consequences of this capitulation:
It raises health care premiums for over twenty million Americans by doubling, in some cases, tripling or quadrupling, and it paves the way for fifteen million people to be thrown off of Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Studies show that some 50,000 Americans will die every year unnecessarily — and all that was done to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1 percent.
Countless Americans today are rightfully incensed not only at the senators who caved but also at Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who let this capitulation happen.
But there’s one more group that deserves our anger today: top union leaders.
The major domino to set off last night’s capitulation was the decision by the American Federation of Government Employees’ (AFGE) national leadership on October 27 to call on Democrats to end the shutdown on Donald Trump’s terms — without any guarantees for tens of millions of Americans’ health care coverage.
The main rationale provided by AFGE president Everett Kelley was that his members were suffering economically from the shutdown. There’s no doubt that this hurt is very real, and I do not doubt the sincerity of Kelley’s commitment to his membership. But AFGE’s leadership could have decided to pressure Republicans rather than Democrats to end the shutdown. That was a political choice.
Rank-and-file AFGE members this morning released an open letter calling on their national leadership to oppose the deal. As one rank-and-file AFGE member wrote to me last night, “Many of us are furious at AFGE leadership. . . . Even if AFGE leaders thought the shutdown had become too costly, they could’ve put the blame squarely on the Republicans who can reopen the gov…
Auteur: Eric Blanc
