The House got a lot of good-natured ribbing from the press this week when they touched down in D.C. for the first time in six weeks. “Remember,” Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan joked, “the big white building with the giant dome is the Capitol. That’s where the House floor is. We know, it’s been a while.” After a month and a half, members might’ve needed a map to their offices before heading across the street to vote. But despite the long (and ultimately pointless) hiatus, even Democrats reluctantly agreed to flip the sign on Congress to “Open.”

Wednesday night, the House voted 222-209 to reopen the government, with two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Greg Steube (Fla.), joining most Democrats in opposing the bill. In the end, six members of Jeffries’s caucus broke ranks to end the insanity, including Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine), Adam Gray (D-Calif.), Don Davis (D-N.C.), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), and Henry Cuellar (D-Texas).

“It’s a shame that it took 42 days,” House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) told Family Research Council’s Jody Hice on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch.” “The bottom line is, the same deal could have been made on day one or even on September 30th,” he lamented. “… Finally, a handful of Democrats came to the realization that no one was [benefiting from] this. Forty million people on SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] weren’t getting their benefits. Millions of people who want to travel by air were being harmed again. Our troops [were] threatened with not being paid. And they came to their senses and joined the Republicans, who never wanted to shut it down, who voted multiple times to reopen the government in the Senate.” He paused. “Thank goodness it’s over. … [B]y Thursday, that this nightmare caused by [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer and [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries will be over.”

To what end for Democrats, no one is quite sure. The decision to reopen the government — while exacting almost nothing in return — has come at a steep price for Schumer, who’s already facing calls to step down from leadership. The livid leftist base is almost riotous, demanding something their party cannot give: a permanent blockade to all things Donald Trump.

As National Review Editor Rich Lowry points out, “In the Trump years, to be progressive is to feel an implacable sense of impotence and rage. This was the real reason for the shutdown — it was a way to give vent to an unreasoning hatred of Donald Trump. … In short, the government shutdown may have been pointless and dumb, but there is much more where that came from.”

This idea that Democrats were somehow going to transform Obamacare by pulling Congress’s emergency brake was doomed to fail from the beginning. Not to mention that this crusade was a problem of the party’s own making (not that the mainstream media could be bothered to explain this). As the Democrats’ emerging voice of reason, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, acknowledged on NPR, “Democrats designed those [Obamacare] tax credits to expire at [the end of] this year. That’s the Democratic Party. That’s not something [Republicans] are taking away. They’re saying, ‘We can have a conversation to extend them.’” But frankly, the unorthodox hoodie-wearer argued, there’s “a way forward to find that without dropping our entire country into this [kind] of chaos.”

As even The Washington Post’s editors shook their heads, the Democrats’ strategy may have temporarily placated their rabid base, but ultimately, the hard truth would come back to bite them. “A cursory tour through the United States’ history with shutdown brinkmanship shows that the party that takes the government hostage to advance its policy goals almost never succeeds,” the editors underscored. “Republicans failed to defund Obamacare in 2013, and President Donald Trump in 2019 failed to secure funding for his border wall.” And yet, then as now, “The theater of obstructionism is more important than policy.”

Speaking of policy, there’s been precious little done on it, thanks to the unplanned hiatus. When House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) put this ordeal behind them, there’s plenty of work clamoring for their attention. After 50-plus days out of session, the House will have lots of committee catch-up work to do as the holiday season (and long recess breaks) close in. According to Politico, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) negotiation is back on the docket, along with some outstanding issues on the NCAA and permitting.

But there are also big-ticket items that the speaker will have to juggle, including the headache of longer-term funding solutions that replace these patchwork CRs. The fact that Johnson and Thune only have until January 30 (with generous holiday vacation weeks in between) to finalize as many as nine appropriations bills screams nightmare. And, as Punchbowl News warns, “The next phase of the FY2026 spending fight is even more difficult. Johnson, Thune, Schumer, Jeffries and the ‘Four Corners’ appropriators will have to find agreement on the most contentious bills, including Labor-HHS, Commerce-Justice-Science, Defense and Homeland Security.”

Obviously, this health care debate also isn’t going away, thanks in part to moderate Republicans who’ve tried to slide their party to the middle on the expiring subsidies. GOP leaders promised a vote on the Obamacare credits as part of the deal to reopen the government. But, to his credit, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) drew a line in the sand when it comes to abortion, which has been federally funded under the Affordable Care Act.

While Thune agreed to talk about the subsidies after the government reopens, he also made it clear that a condition of any deal would be closing the loophole that allows taxpayer-funded abortion. “A one-year extension along the lines of what [Democrats] are suggesting, and without Hyde protections … doesn’t even get close.” His fellow South Dakota colleague, Senator Mike Rounds (R), echoed the sentiment. “That’s the message that we shared with a lot of our Democratic colleagues is you can’t do it under your existing framework, and you’re never going to get any Republican votes. Because we believe strongly taxpayer dollars should not go to fund abortions,” he said. “They have a different point of view, but it’s pretty clear that Republicans are solid on that particular issue.”

With just 49 days until the Obamacare credits expire, the president is said to be hatching his own Trumpcare plan to solve the high premium problem. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the president “is absolutely open to having conversations about health care, and I think you’ll see the president putting forth some really good policy proposals the Democrats should take very seriously to fix again the system that they broke.”

He expanded on that with Laura Ingraham in a sit-down interview Tuesday, saying, “What I want … instead of going to the insurance companies, I want the money to go into an account for people, where the people buy their own health insurance. It’s so good,” Trump emphasized, “the insurance will be better. It will cost less. Everybody is going to be happy. They’re going to feel like entrepreneurs. They’re actually going to be able to go out and negotiate their own health insurance, and they can use it only for that reason.”

Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Hern (R) didn’t seem daunted by the system’s overhaul on “Washington Watch,” telling former Congressman Jody Hice that the House and Senate “will work diligently with the administration to work on reducing the cost, to find ways to the people that are struggling on the most difficult areas of health care,” especially for those on lower income scales. Congress needs to work on “structural changes to the health care system,” he reiterated, “working with the hospitals, working with the pharmaceutical companies, working with the insurance companies to come together. I’ve had meetings today with two of these groups already. And the president, you saw what he’s doing with the pharmaceutical companies and the most favored nation work. He understands,” Hern emphasized. “The president wants to make sure that health care can be affordable to all Americans, not just those who are wealthy.”

Then, of course, there’s the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that, as Americans have learned this week, just won’t die. Trump is trying to paint the resurgence of the controversy as the Democrats’ attempt to distract from their disaster of a shutdown. “The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects,” the president posted. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap.”

Regardless of the motivation, the House’s hand will be forced by the Democrats’ discharge petition, which hit the magic number of signatures after new Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) was sworn in this week. The discharge petition, a tool of the House minority, forces the chamber to act on an issue if 218 members demand it. While getting the petition over the line is a victory, the GOP may still be able to keep their members in check on the tricky debate on releasing all of the Justice Department’s files in relation to the sexual predator.

All of this and more awaits a House and Senate leadership who’ve been stymied for a month and a half by an asinine partisan stunt. “Voters are going to remember who played political games with their lives,” Johnson stressed. Now that it’s over, one thing’s for certain: it doesn’t get easier. But then, in this sharply divided climate like this one, it never is.