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The way Tim Kaine told it to us on Monday, he wasn’t just one of the eight Senate Democrat votes on the tenuous deal with Republicans to end the shutdown, but a driving force. And if you’re among those who think Kaine and the eight sold out what Democrats had been hoping to achieve in their 40-day fight to lower healthcare costs, Kaine has six words for you. “I say, I think they’re wrong,” Kaine, D-Va., told reporters on a conference call on Monday. ICYMI Senate Democrats cave on healthcare fight: It was all just for show, apparently Tell us what you really think, there, Tim. “They’re entitled to their opinions, but I’ve been doing this for 31 years, and I’m not new to negotiations, I’m not new to negotiations with Republicans,” said Kaine, a former governor, who has represented Virginia in the U.S. Senate since 2013, and was the Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee in 2016; he was re-elected to a third term last fall, and wouldn’t face the electorate again until 2030, when he would be 72. All due respect to Tim Kaine for his service, I’m not the biggest fan of the I know better than you do messaging here, which is not something I can remember ever seeing from Kaine, in my 24 years of covering him, dating back to his run for lieutenant governor way back in 2001. He’s no doubt feeling the pressure from the critics, who aren’t just people like me – center-left journos – and center-left and progressive folks on the interwebs, but also include a raft of Senate and House Democrats, who feel like Kaine and the eight caved in to the MAGA side for a pinkie promise that Republicans will allow a December vote on extending Affordable Care Act tax credits. To wit: “There’s no way to sugarcoat what happened tonight. And my fear is that Trump gets stronger, not weaker, because of this acquiescence. I’m angry – like you. But I choose to keep fighting,” Connecticut Senate Democrat Chris Murphy “People want us to hold the line for a reason,” New York House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “This is not a matter of appealing to a base. It’s about people’s lives. Working people want leaders whose word means something.” “This is not a deal – it’s an empty promise,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker “Trump and his Republican Congress are making healthcare more expensive for the middle class and ending it for working families. Time for Democrats to stand tall for affordable healthcare.” Kaine explained on the conference call that he started to involve himself in the Senate negotiations on the shutdown on Wednesday, a day after the elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City that saw Democrats sweep to landslide victories in races that pollsters had projected would be close, and some had suggested may even tip to the MAGA side. ICYMI Message sent: Democrats sweep Virginia, New Jersey, New York City races on historic night So, big wins for Democrats, we had Donald Trump outright saying publicly that the reason his side suffered those big losses was because of the shutdown, and we had Kaine reading the room this way: “As I looked at where we were on Wednesday, you know, it became pretty apparent to me that this was the state of play. We wanted to fix the ACA tax credit issue, but we had no path to do so, because the Republicans, at President Trump’s direction, had said they would not even entertain any discussion about health care until the government was reopened,” Kaine began the explanation of the evolution of his thinking on the Monday call with reporters. “And second, the shutdown of government was imposing significant pain on Virginians, federal workers missing paychecks, SNAP beneficiaries starting to get their benefits cut by President Trump withholding monies, but also just the timing and some of the SNAP cuts that were made by the Republicans in the reconciliation bill were really starting to pinch the 800,000-plus Virginians who get SNAP benefits. Air traffic becoming very, very chaotic. And so, where we were when I really had the chance after the elections to kind of assess this was, we had no path forward on healthcare, as long as the government was shut down, and SNAP beneficiaries, 45 million Americans, one in eight most vulnerable Americans, were hurting, along with so many others.” We all foresaw all of this back in late September as the situation hurtled toward the Oct. 1 shutdown, because Trump signaled that he was not open to compromise, threatened to primary anyone from the Republican caucuses in the House and Senate who would give away the game to Democrats, and has put his focus on trying to pressure Senate Republicans to go with the “nuclear option” killing the filibuster once and for all to pass a funding bill without Democratic support. ICYMI Trump signals that he will use the shutdown to stiff government employees ‘Terrifying storm brewing’ if Republicans won’t extend healthcare tax credits Deadline looming: Thousands of flights will be cancelled if government doesn’t reopen soon Mike Johnson accidentally tells the truth on the filibuster: ‘What would the Democrats do?’ The solution, to Kaine, is to, in effect, pull a Trump – I’m referring here to how Trump’s strategy for getting himself out of the problems he caused with his disastrous tariffs on China was to negotiate us back to where we were before he instituted the tariffs in the spring to be able to declare victory and move on. The “piece” that Kaine said Monday he brought to the table “was protecting federal employees, and what I asked the White House beginning on Friday afternoon is, you’ve got to make sure all furloughed employees come back, and they all get paid.” Kaine also wanted, and says he got, assurances from the White House that the administration would guarantee “no RIFs (reduction-in-force layoffs) in the future, no more of this mass layoff stuff that is making every federal employee wake up and check their emails first thing in the morning to see if they got an email from the DOGE brothers or somebody else telling them that their careers of public service are now terminated.” The senator said he got that assurance “at 4:45 yesterday afternoon, and that enabled me to say that I was going to vote yes on this bill.” “So, here’s what we got. Instead of no path forward on ACA, we have a guaranteed vote coming up within a month on a proposal of the Democrats design,” Kaine said, with the force indicating that he actually believes Senate Majority Leader John Thune will actually follow through with the “guarantee” that is anything but. More of “what we got,” per Kaine: “We have come up with a full year of robust funding for SNAP and other important programs so that those 45 million, but also our passengers and air-traffic controllers and folks who were suffering during the shutdown, that will now be over,” Kaine said. “And finally, we have gotten these protections for federal employees, restoration to your job, back pay and no risks going forward.” So, a Trumpian win – “what we got” is where we were on Sept. 30, with government employees getting paid for their work, full funding for SNAP, and maybe we get a vote on extending the ACA tax credits, maybe we don’t. We won’t talk about how those 45 million Americans who had their SNAP benefits cut out from under them had to go to food banks whose reserves had already been depleted by funding cuts from Congress from earlier in the year, and how all of those federal employees and air-traffic controllers have had to go to work every day for the past six weeks without getting paid, many forced to taking out second mortgages and hitting up the strained food banks in the meantime. And for what? A promise that Senate Republicans will allow a vote on extending those ACA tax credits we all know they will not vote to extend? “We’re going to have a debate and vote on the Senate floor about a healthcare fix,” Kaine said. “It will be a bill that the Democrats will write, and we’ll write it, you know, to accomplish folks’ needs, make sure their healthcare costs don’t spike. But also, we’re going to write in a way to try to attract as many Republican votes as we can. “We’ll all go on the record on that bill. Every Virginian will get to look at all of us and say, OK, did they fight for me? Did they fight to bring healthcare costs down, or were they ignoring me and letting healthcare costs go up? And then everybody is going to be accountable to their voters next year for the decision that they made.” So, we get a show debate, and fodder for Democrats to use for campaign ads in the 2026 midterms: got it. Because even if we get this vote in the Senate, which may or may not actually happen, and the bill that Kaine says will be debated somehow passes there, the Senate is but one of the three legs here. House Speaker Mike Johnson wouldn’t even have to bring the bill to the House floor if he doesn’t want to – and let’s just get that out of the way right now: he doesn’t want to. “Speaker Johnson, if the Senate passes this with bipartisan support, you’re right, the Speaker could say, I’m ignoring the healthcare needs of 25 million Americans, and we’re not going to have a vote,” Kaine conceded. “But we have every Democrat on the House that wants this vote, and we have a huge number of Republicans who have already written a letter to the Speaker saying we need to have a vote to fix the ACA tax credits. There’s a procedural maneuver in the House called the discharge petition, where if a majority of House members sign a letter saying, we want this bill on the floor, it goes on the floor. By my count, there’s already sufficient votes on the House side to do a discharge petition to force a vote on what the Senate does. So, the Speaker may try to block it, I think it would be political malpractice for him to block it, but even if he does block it, there is a maneuver on the House side that would enable those who claim they want to vote on this to have a clear majority and get a vote on this. I can’t control what the House does. “I’ve got to focus on trying to win these votes in the Senate. But my sense is, if we pass this in the Senate in a bipartisan way, there will be enormous pressure, and, frankly, unavoidable pressure for the House to take it up, too.” Kaine wasn’t asked the next obvious follow-up: OK, let’s say we get a vote in the Senate, that it somehow passes there, a discharge petition get the bill on the House floor, and it passes the House, next up, Trump has to sign on, which he has made clear, he doesn’t like anything to do with Obamacare. I know – don’t ask me how – that Kaine doesn’t like my characterization of this compromise that he’s an integral part of as being a “political stunt,” but I can’t think of another way to describe it, or to look at how this can be the satisfying final resolution of 40 days of government shutdown. “The Republicans said on Day 1 of the shutdown they would refuse to engage on any discussion about healthcare until the government was open, and I stuck with the Democratic team on this for about 40 days,” Kaine said. “The Republicans didn’t change, and they said, they told me repeatedly, we want to negotiate about this, we’ve got to fix this, or the midterm elections next year will look even worse than the Virginia elections last week, but we won’t engage as long as government is shut down. And I eventually concluded that we weren’t going to change their mind on that.” Let’s reason with Kaine on this: Republicans, he said, told him repeatedly that they want to negotiate, acknowledging that the midterms won’t go well for them if they don’t, but they’re not going to negotiate as long as the government is shut down – and he decided to give them an out? Is that what he is saying here? I’m not asking; that is what he’s saying here. “If we had kept the government shut down for another week, would they have relented? No. Another month, would they have relented? No,” Kaine said. “The one thing I could have guaranteed, though, is that SNAP beneficiaries would suffer more federal workers would miss more paychecks, air-traffic control would be more chaotic. When you run into a red line in a negotiation that they’re not going to change, you don’t beat your head repeatedly against the red line. You try to find areas where you can progress that aren’t behind the red line. So, yeah, I became convinced when kind of the dust settled after the Virginia elections, which were really occupying a lot of my energy, I just became convinced that they were not going to work with us on healthcare without government open, and SNAP beneficiaries were suffering. “We were able to fully fund SNAP and other important programs, even undoing some of the damage that the Republicans had done in the reconciliation bill, and we’re able to get a guaranteed vote on a Democratic proposal to fix healthcare within a month,” Kaine said. “Now look, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to pass, but we have a path to a fix, where, while government was shut down, we had no path to a fix. So, we’re going to follow that path. We’re going to do our very best to convince Republicans to fix the mess that they made. All Americans will get to see this debate when it’s on center stage, under the spotlight, and there’s no background noise of all the shutdown effects drawing people’s attention away from the healthcare fight. That’s what we got. And together with the appropriations wins and my protection for federal employees, that was enough to give me the yes.”
