Once the Senate finally voted for cloture, ending the filibuster, we all knew the end of the shutdown was near.

The House came back into session on Wednesday to vote on the set of “minibus” funding bills now attached to the continuing resolution, which the Senate had passed on Monday night. Speaker Mike Johnson was already recalling House members back to Washington DC in order to end the shutdown as quickly as possible. Despite Democrats trotting out their new talking point about an “eight week vacation,” the House Rules Committee advanced the compromise funding bill late Tuesday night, in order to have a final vote on Wednesday.

However, Democrats tried one last ditch effort to try and wring some kind of win out of the entire shutdown debacle. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries tried attaching a THREE YEAR EXTENSION of the expiring Obamacare subsidies to the bill as an amendment. Jeffries then tried to bring it to the floor as a “discharge petition” – meaning that if he could get a majority of the House to sign on, then the House would be forced to take a floor vote. So far, Jeffries doesn’t have the votes for it. And the final House vote on the new funding package went forward – with Democrats supporting it.

BREAKING: House Republicans just officially passed the bill to END the Democrat Shutdown.

President Trump will sign it into law tonight at 9:45p ET. pic.twitter.com/sNz81TnoeO

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) November 13, 2025

Six House Democrats voted for the funding measure in the House’s first legislative move since going into recess after Sept. 19.

Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Don Davis (D-NC), Adam Gray (D-Calif.), Jared Golden (D-Maine), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) crossed party lines to vote with the majority.

Two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Greg Steube (R-Fla.), voted against the Senate-passed bill.

Now, Massie votes against everything, and Steube was specifically concerned about the provision that the Senate snuck in to allow senators to sue over their phone records being targeted by the FBI during “Operation Arctic Frost.” However, Speaker Johnson has said that he intends to overturn that part of the bill, but didn’t want to keep the government shutdown going while that gets repealed.

What is more interesting are the six Democrats who voted to pass the bill and end the shutdown. Jared Golden of Maine has already announced he’s not running for re-election, so he has nothing to gain by keeping the shutdown going. But Golden, and the rest of these Democrats, are all representing districts that voted for Donald Trump in 2024. In short, they would like to keep their seats in the 2026 midterms, and not be tarred with the shutdown brush.

Once the vote had passed, the bill got whisked over to the White House, where President Trump was ready to sign it and end the shutdown.

“It’s an honor now to sign this incredible bill and get our country working again,” Trump said in the Oval Office, flanked by House Republican leaders as well as business and union leaders.

The president blasted “extremist” Democrats for shutting down the government, accusing them of attempting to “extort American taxpayers.”

“This cost the country $1.5 trillion,” Trump said of the shutdown, describing it as a “little excursion” that Democrats took “purely for political reasons.”

Trump re-upped his demand for Senate Republicans to “terminate” the filibuster — so that “this would never happen again” — and called for the “massive amount” of federal funding for Obamacare to be “paid directly to the people of our country, so that they can buy their own healthcare.”

President Trump is going to keep complaining about the filibuster, despite the fact that the shoe could be on the other foot by the time the midterms are over. What would be smart would be for the Senate to vote to make the filibuster permanent, instead of this game of chicken with the nuclear option that gets played all the time now.

So, Democrats must be pleased, right? After all, they were blaming Republicans for the shutdown, and now that it’s over…

House Democrats are back at work — and, boy, are they mad.

They’re mad at the Senate Democrats who cut them out of negotiations and cut the deal to reopen the government after a record 43-day shutdown. They’re mad at Speaker Mike Johnson for keeping the House out of session all that time for what they’re calling a “seven-week paid vacation.” And they’re mad that, after all that, there’s still no clear path forward on meeting their key demand — an extension of health insurance subsidies that expire next month.

Their fury was evident across the Capitol in the 24 hours leading up to Wednesday’s decisive vote reopening the government as they took stock of a long, bitter fight that ended without a clear win and left many spoiling for fights and in little mood to compromise with Republicans.

That sour mood stands to linger with another shutdown deadline approaching in January and members hoping to somehow forge a bipartisan compromise on the insurance subsidies in the coming weeks.

“The Senate says they will have a vote [on the subsidies],” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. “Do I trust any of them? Hell no.”

One of the most incredible messaging failures mostly from the media I've ever seen

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) November 13, 2025

The Democrats have made this Schrödinger’s shutdown – it was the Republicans’ fault that it happened, and now it’s the Republicans’ fault that it’s ending without the Democrats getting any major wins. Weird. And now they want to get testy and pissy over the next deadline at the end of January, even though they are now robbed of certain types of “leverage,” like the SNAP funding – thanks to the “minibus” bills that were passed. The Democrats might be mad enough to try another shutdown, but it won’t be nearly as painful, and it will look like a temper tantrum.

With the shutdown at an end, certain court cases will now be moot, federal employees (including the military and air traffic controllers) will be getting their back pay, and air travel will unsnarl itself in time for the Thanksgiving holiday. For now, things will get back to some form of “normal,” and all the Democrats got was some Election Day wins, and the promise of a vote in the Senate that will likely fail. Was it really worth all that?

Featured image via Proulain on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license