When a few Senate Democrats voted to end the longest government shutdown in history last month, the one concession they secured from Republican leader John Thune was a mid-December vote on a measure to extend expiring Obamacare premium subsidies. The vote is now supposed to happen later this week amid general acknowledgment that without action on the subsidies, both premiums and out-of-pocket costs for over 20 million Americans are going to skyrocket in January.

This will be a much bigger problem for Republicans than for Democrats, for three reasons: (1) Democrats have been hyperventilating over this “subsidy cliff” for months, placing it at the very center of their shutdown strategy; (2) it’s part of a more general health-care policy landscape in which the GOP is widely perceived as either feckless or cruel; and (3) Republicans run the entire federal government, and their leader, Donald Trump, dominates political discourse 24/7.

Yet Republicans are very likely to pass up the opportunity to do anything about this situation other than agitate the air and shift blame. The original Thune strategy was to put up competing Democratic and Republican “solutions” to the subsidy cliff and see if either could pass (very unlikely given the need for 60 votes to do anything in the Senate), or if, perhaps, a compromise might emerge. Now the big question is whether Republicans can come up........

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