Democrats Caved in the Shutdown Fight. Unions Let Them.

In a spectacular act of cowardice and idiocy, seven Democratic Party senators and one independent voted last night 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 20 million Americans by doubling, in some cases, tripling or quadrupling and it paves the way for 15 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%.

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.

One of the dominoes that set off last night’s capitulation was the decision by the American Federation of Government Employees’s national leadership on October 27 to call on Democrats to end the shutdown on 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. 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. The fact that other unions representing federal employees like IFPTE and SEIU chose not to cave to Republicans puts into sharp relief that AFGE made 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 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 at any time by changing the senate rules.” And far from surrendering after putting up a hard fight, AFGE from day one of this shutdown has refused to provide any serious redlines for the Republicans and has refused to launch any real pressure campaigns against them.

AFGE leaders aren’t the only part of organized labor that paved