When eight Senate Democrats crossed partisan lines and voted to end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history on November 9, the consensus was that they (and, perhaps privately, other congressional Democrats) believed the shutdown was no longer serving any useful purpose. It wasn’t going to move Republicans on the Obamacare subsidy extension the minority had demanded and was doing too much damage to Democratic constituencies to merit its continuance. They did get a promise from John Thune to arrange a December Senate vote on some sort of subsidy extension and perhaps hoped that Donald Trump would step in and impose a health-care compromise on his troops. That decidedly didn’t happen; a subsidy-extension bill died on the Senate floor last week with only four Republicans joining Democrats in voting for a simple extension.

The House is currently struggling toward its own vote on some kind of health-care options: likely an Obamacare-extension bill with “reforms” limiting eligibility and a non-Obamacare bill embracing various GOP health-care-cost panaceas. But there’s no way health-care legislation will actually get through Congress and across Trump’s desk before Obamacare subsidies expire on December 31 and terrible things happen to the........

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