Nine million children and their parents, as well as roughly half of the pregnant women in the United States, are breathing easier today as CHIP has been funded for the next six years.
Smug panelist Noah Rothman of Commentary tried to argue that Democrats have lost a "narrative" that allowed them to point to Republicans as taking children hostage with CHIP funding:
"...the narrative that it was Republicans trying to hold CHIP funding hostage -- CHIP funding is gone. it's off the table. We sort of skipped a step there."
Hey Noah, there is no way that any panicked mother of a CHIP child isn't still aware that Republicans held their child's health insurance hostage. We will never ever forget that.
That's why polling looks like this...
And Joe Scarborough wasn't buying it, either:
SCARBOROUGH: You said they lost something, but they got CHIP Funding, right? ...If I'm a Democrat and, of course, I'm not, but God knows I'm sounding more like one every morning, if I were a Democrat and I went back to my town hall meeting, and they said you backed down, I would say, "I did what? I did what? I guaranteed by standing up to Donald Trump and making sure he was out of this process, I guaranteed CHIP Funding. I guaranteed by my fighting. You're telling me that a three-day shutdown wasn't worth guaranteeing health care for millions and millions of the truly disadvantaged children?" That's a win for Democrats if they know how to spin it the right way.
Rothman then played some false equivalence between the Democrats of today and the Republicans of 2013, ignoring that the base of the Republican Party is actually crazy, and the Tea Party tried to hold funding the entire federal government hostage in order to defund Obamacare. There is a huge difference between the Republican and Democratic bases, and the argument of defunding healthcare for millions out of spite for Obama, versus helping DREAMers not get deported. Scarborough dismissed that conversation and went back to his original point:
SCARBOROUGH: If Democrats are smart enough to know how to fight and right now that is a question that we don't have an answer to, they will go home and say right I shut down the government for three days and in those three days, Republicans caved and now we have health care for little children who didn't have health care before our government shutdown. We win, they lose.
EUGENE ROBINSON: ...The six years of CHIP Funding is the one really big concrete thing Democrats got out of this. And, frankly, with all respect to say that they lost a narrative while getting the essential thing they were fighting for is kind of ridiculous. I mean, they got something they had definitely sought. And they got it for six years. So they certainly -- look, if they don't paint that as a win from the shutdown, then they're guilty of political malpractice.