As I’m writing this, House Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to find a way to get his tiny Republican majority to pass legislation to prevent the federal government from shutting down at midnight. Since Wednesday, the chaos conference has been getting most of the attention, and rightly so, but I have been paying more attention to the Democratic leadership.

In particular, to Hakeem Jeffries.

Until two days ago, the minority leader had an agreement with Johnson to fund the government through March with appropriations for things like pediatric cancer research and natural disaster relief. Everything was set to go. The House would pass it. The Senate would pass it. The president would sign it. Everyone would go home happy.

By Wednesday night, however, Elon Musk had chimed in. He posted on Twitter either bald-faced lies about the agreement or plain dumb ignorance about how appropriations work. Then, according to last night’s broadcast of ABC Nightly News, the president-elect “followed Musk’s lead,” raising an unrelated demand to eliminate the debt ceiling. 

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Johnson spent all day yesterday cobbling together support for a new bill that would please nearly all the House Republicans, that would please Donald Trump, and that would please an unelected billionaire tycoon, not to mention a bill that would please a supermajority of the US Senate and a sitting president who is, lest we forget, a Democrat.

And the outcome of that legislation was befitting of its impossible goal. Last night, Johnson brought it to the floor. It went down in flames. 

But the fact that the Republicans could not pass their own legislation didn’t surprise me. We have been here before. We will be here again. 

What surprised me was the unity shown by Jeffries and his caucus in the face of the chaos. All but two Democrats voted against the new bill, even though voting against it made them vulnerable to future charges of having shut down the government. Put another way, what surprised me was that the Democrats did not put governing above politics.

Jeffries’ initial reaction was what you might expect. At a presser, he said his caucus is “resolved to stand up for the best interests of the American people.” He said the bipartisan agreement “has been detonated” because the House Republicans “have been ordered – ordered! – to shut down the government and hurt the very working class Americans that many of them pretend to want to help.”

It was just getting good when he pulled his punches. “This is a moment that’s not about the incoming president. It’s not about millionaires and billionaires. It’s about the harm that House Republicans will do to the American people if the government shuts down” (my italics). 

This is what the Democrats do when they put governance above politics – when they privilege higher-order values like compromise and bipartisanship over the practical realities of political competition. The objective in that case is fighting for the American people, not necessarily against the GOP opposition. If Democratic lawmakers suffered political damage in the pursuit of that objective, so be it.

This way of thinking animated virtually all of Joe Biden’s tenure. He acted like the “Biden nullification project,” as defined by Steve Bannon, was merely a distraction from the vital work of serving the American people. He acted like the Republicans, if they would just stop listening to cranks and yahoos, would get to work restoring the soul of America.

This way of thinking also assumed that the people would recognize the vital work being done in their name. But after this election, it’s safe to say that the vital work cannot be left to speak for itself, as the people cannot and will not recognize it for what it is, not as long as there are Steve Bannons around to “nullify” the Democrats who are doing it.

Which brings me back to Hakeem Jeffries and the House Democrats. Where they ended up today is different from where they started. 

Their rhetoric, as of this morning, suggests a small but meaningful shift in their way of thinking, away from the idea that the Republicans represent a distraction from the problems facing the American people and toward the idea that the Republicans are themselves the problem. 

Before, Jeffries said this moment was not about Trump. It was not about billionaires. But last night, after all but two Democrats voted against it, he shifted. It was now, he said, the “Musk-Johnson government shutdown bill.” Moreover, at the center of his remarks wasn’t what the Democrats were doing for the people but instead what the Republicans were doing to them. “Maga extremists in the House GOP are not serious about helping working class Americans. They are simply doing the bidding of their wealthy donors and puppeteers.”

This morning, he went further. 

“The Republicans are marching America toward a painful government shutdown that will crash the economy and hurt working class Americans, because they would rather enact massive tax cuts for their billionaire donors than fund cancer research for children,” he said.

Jeffries isn’t alone. Other Democrats in the House as well as the Senate are attacking the Republicans, blaming them, as if they were a disloyal bunch of thieves, liars and swindlers, which is exactly what they are.

It didn’t have to be this way. There is an alternative universe in which the House minority leader laments the fact that the shadow president sabotaged bipartisan compromise but nonetheless encourages his caucus to vote for the new bill for the sake of the American people.

There is a separate timeline in which the Democrats keep going high while the Republicans keep going low – in which they defend the institutions of democracy as those institutions crumble around them.

But in this reality, they’re fighting hard. It’s as if practical necessity has forced them to relearn something important about this country. 

Politics isn’t a bad thing.

It’s the only thing.