Maggie Hassan is a Democratic US senator from New Hampshire.
This isn’t how the government of the world’s greatest democracy is supposed to work.
The chaos and dysfunction of President Trump’s Washington was on full display in the recent federal government shutdown fight — the longest government shutdown in American history. The president played with people’s lives, flaunted his callous indifference to the suffering of American families, and pushed the bounds of the law for his political gain … all to prevent people from getting health care.
And so, along with a number of my colleagues, I said enough.
Enough of Trump’s shutdown. Enough of using the American people as pawns in a game that they never agreed to play. Enough of a Washington that cares more about scoring points than about solving problems.
We in the Senate rejected the president’s demands to pass only what he wanted and instead secured a bipartisan deal that protects food benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and benefits for veterans for a year. We required Speaker Mike Johnson to finally bring the House back into session after 54 days away, and we reversed the president’s recent reckless layoffs of federal workers while preventing future layoffs. And, crucially, we made sure that the Senate will vote on a measure to protect the Affordable Care Act’s tax cuts, so that families can afford to buy health insurance.
There were some who wanted the government shutdown to continue, believing that there was an opportunity to get the Republicans and Trump to compromise more. I think that’s mistaken. Trump revels in cruelty and does not think he is accountable to the Constitution or the American people.
This is a president who used the shutdown to unilaterally take away programs that help hungry families buy groceries, while throwing a lavish party at his private club. This is a president who did not care about the impact of delayed air travel on Americans or that air traffic controllers were working without pay so long as his own plane was still flying. And this is a president who did not care about law enforcement officers struggling to make rent, so long as he could keep building his ballroom.
To think that Trump, a man who tried to overthrow our free and fair elections, would be moved to do the right thing with enough public pressure is to simply ignore who he truly is.
Moreover, the vast majority of my Senate Republican colleagues have never meaningfully broken with the president, and they were not about to start now. As someone who has been at many negotiating tables, it was clear to me that a deal on health care was not possible if the shutdown continued.
Now that the shutdown has ended, the American people will put Republicans to the test. I believe that we are closer today than we were last week to reaching an agreement on the extension of Affordable Care Act’s tax cuts, but should Republicans fail to work constructively to get this done, people will know who stood between them and access to affordable health care.
Finally, the longest government shutdown in history came with real human costs. It’s easy to talk about “winning” shutdown fights, but it doesn’t seem like winning to parents who are wondering about how they’ll feed their kids. Winning the political spin on a talk show doesn’t matter to the public health worker who lost their job. After that 40th day without a paycheck for a nurse at the VA, it becomes clear that there are no winners as long as the government remains shut down.
Trump’s politics of division created the longest government shutdown in American history and harmed our country. Of course, it didn’t have to be this way. When I was governor of New Hampshire, a purple state, I worked with a divided state Legislature in my first term and a Republican majority in my second. We had budget battles and health care fights, too. But we never would have thrown our state into chaos like this.
We showed up to do the work we were elected to do. We negotiated. We worked together. We did our jobs because that’s what our constituents rightly expected and deserved. That’s what the people of the United States deserve today as well.