This is a lightly edited transcript of the November 10 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by my colleagues, Monica Potts and Alex Shephard, and we’re here to discuss the Democrats’ deal—capitulation, we can pick different words here—that broke last night in terms of ending the government shutdown, potentially. And so, just gimme your instant reactions, Monica.

Monica Potts: I mean, I think my instant reaction was one of just disappointment, because the Democrats really had public opinion on their side. Most voters—most American voters—blamed Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown. They wanted Democrats to continue to fight for enhanced subsidies to make healthcare more affordable.

That was really a winning argument, and they won soundly on Tuesday. They really could have carried that momentum forward by putting more and more pressure on the Republicans as the shutdown increased pain on Americans. And it’s, you know, a lot of the effects of the shutdown were increasingly serious.

It was really an important thing to address the needs people had. So I understand why people wanted to get the government reopened—you know, people needed their paychecks; SNAP beneficiaries needed their benefits. But the pressure was really on Republicans to solve those problems.

And politically, I think that they could have lasted a little longer.

Alex Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s just a total disaster—like, across the board. I think they could have—if, you know, I think that the pain of the shutdown was real—but if that was actually the case, right? They should have reopened the government 10 days ago, and that’s not what they did.

And I think, one, they lost an argument that they were winning—intentionally, right? So that, by reopening the government now, six days after these elections that they just won, it’s hard to argue with the fact that this was a Democrat-controlled shutdown. I think that’s the sort of top line. I dunno. But the other thing here—well, there’s three things.

So, the second thing is that, you know, at every point here, right, Republicans were losing. They were losing over anger and anxiety heading into Thanksgiving and Christmas. They were losing on Obamacare. And then they were losing on all these sort of illegal SNAP benefits. And on each one of those points, Democrats bailed out Republicans.

Right? They allowed them to just sort of escape an argument that they were losing—and they got nothing for it. And that sort of leads me to the third point, which I think is the thing that makes me angriest: there’s just no way of looking at this and not saying that it’s ultimately about the filibuster. Republicans and Trump were getting closer and closer to fully nuking the filibuster.