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It’s (almost) over. The House passed legislation Wednesday evening to reopen the government, and President Donald Trump says he’ll sign it. With that, the longest government shutdown in history will come to a close. And that will be because Democrats caved—again.

For the past 40-plus days, the Dems and the GOP have been in a Senate stalemate, in which Democrats withheld support for a government funding bill in an attempt to include expanded Obamacare subsidies that helped more Americans afford health insurance. Republicans refused, and, as they lacked the 60 votes needed to pass this budget resolution on their own, the government shut down.

That deadlock finally ended Sunday night, when a group of Democratic senators agreed to reopen the government without an extension of the expanded subsidies. Instead, Democrats secured the promise of a future vote on whether to revive the subsidies.

The bill to reopen the government includes long-term funding for a few federal bodies (the Agriculture Department, Veterans Affairs, and Congress itself) and temporary funding for all other agencies, up until the bill’s expiration date of Jan. 30. There’s also a pledge to rehire the hundreds of thousands of federal workers laid off since Oct. 1, provide them back pay, and restrict any other layoff efforts until Jan. 30. And there’s some much weirder stuff: a measure to recriminalize any hemp products with more than 0.4 milligrams of THC, which would all but destroy a thriving industry that has benefited farmers and small-business owners; a provision allowing Republican senators to sue the government over phone records collected without their knowledge during Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation; and billions of dollars afforded to Army and Navy facility upgrades.

The timing of Democrats’ concession is particularly confusing, given that polling showed that the public consistently blamed Trump and the GOP for the shutdown. That remained true even as the administration tried to maximize the shutdown’s pain for the public: canceling flights, laying off federal workers, and falsely claiming that it couldn’t distribute full SNAP benefits amid the shutdown. None of that, however, seemed to convince voters that Democrats were at fault.

So why did eight members of the Senate Democratic caucus—Catherine Cortez Masto, Dick Durbin, John Fetterman, Maggie Hassan, Tim Kaine, Jacky Rosen, Jeanne Shaheen, and independent Angus King—choose this moment to fold?

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