What’s next, post-shutdown? A local political science professor weighs in

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- ABC News reports eight Senate Democrats and six in the House broke ranks, voting to end the shutdown after a record 43 days.

Jim Curry, PhD, is a Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame. He thinks a lot of Democrats wanted to reopen the government for a while, but there were some things holding them up.

“One of them was just pressure from the party base, party voters who wanted Democrats to put up a bigger fight against Donald Trump and the White House, and Republicans-- voters who were still unhappy from the last election. They wanted to see a fight, and so Democrats went along with a fight, but I don't think all of them are always super happy, especially in the Senate,” said Curry. “So what really happened was just time wore on, and the potential negative consequences of a shutdown got greater and greater and greater, with things like SNAP benefits starting to dry up for SNAP recipients throughout the country, flight disruptions starting to happen at major airports throughout the country, and I think as these negative consequences started to layer on, more Democrats were willing to publicly, actually break with the party line and vote to do the thing that I think many of them had wanted to do since the beginning, which was get the government back open and get things back to work.”

After the House passed the funding bill on Wednesday, ABC News reports democratic house leaders released a statement, vowing to fight for Affordable Care Act tax credits, which are expected to expire at the end of this year–possibly resulting in higher premiums for those who get their insurance through the ACA marketplace.

AP news reports that if Republicans and Democrats can’t find common ground on the issue before a December vote in the Senate, average premiums will double for millions.

Curry says going forward, this will be a big topic in Congress.

“That'll be the major focus of Congress now for the next two months. In addition to trying to pass full fiscal 26 spending bills, there's going to be this intense negotiation over what to do on the potential expiration of the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies,” said Curry.

He says there isn’t an agreement between Democrats and Republicans about what to do.

“Democrats would just like to extend them. They would just like to continue the enhanced subsidies that were put in place during the COVID years, and just keep them going forward, because they keep premiums down. Republicans are not necessarily on board with just a clean extension of these enhanced subsidies. There's some Republicans that would like to do that. The White House seems to signal they want to do something to keep them moving forward, because I don't think the White House wants to own the prospect of people's health insurance costs going up very suddenly ahead of the next election,” said Curry. “However, a lot of Republicans want to do something to either broadly reform the Affordable Care Act, to take care of these big costs that have become billions and billions of dollars of federal spending, or to make other cuts to help pay for it or do other subsets of reforms. And so I think what you're going to see is first, Republicans in the House and the Senate have to figure out what sort of changes they're willing to back, and then they can negotiate with Democrats over what can both sides agree to keep these subsidies going in some form, but not necessarily just keep spending more and more money to keep premiums down.”

ABC57 also asked Curry about various shutdown-related disruptions and when he thinks things may go back to normal.

Flights:

“Flight disruptions are already going down, but it takes a little bit of time now there's backlog, and things have to work themselves out a little bit,” said Curry.

SNAP, Federal workers:

“SNAP benefits seem to be coming back quickly, but there's still the reality that people missed SNAP payments,” said Curry. 

Curry says SNAP recipients will likely get the next round. Read more on SNAP benefits here.

“It doesn’t wipe away the pain that was experienced before, and that's the same for federal workers, who will get back pay for what they didn't receive, but they'll never get the interest back on the money they would have earned if it was in their bank account or if it was in their retirement funds. And so, there's always this long-term lingering negative consequence for people who were receiving federal benefits or federal pay,” said Curry.

Curry also added that people should pay attention to what Sen. Tim Kaine (D) Virginia got into the bill.

“He was essentially the final deciding, pivotal senator's vote. He's what got them to 60 votes. He had been holding out for a while, for a couple things in the bill related to federal employees. As one of Virginia's senators, a lot of federal employees live in his state. So, he was particularly motivated on this. He got language in there that would essentially pause any further reductions in force from the White House on federal employees through the end of January, through the ends of the term of this agreement, which is a pretty big deal. You know, as we know, for the last 9-10 months, the Trump administration has been laying off federal workers by using this reduction-in-force, this RIF policy,” said Curry. “This language now bars them from doing that for the next few months, which is a big win for federal employees. It's a big win, I think, for Democrats, broadly, who haven't liked these layoffs of federal employees. And we'll see if that sort of language now gets negotiated into further spending bills as they try to pass legislation that will fund the government through the end of the 2026 fiscal year.”