C’mon, did anyone expect otherwise? Knowing that he was going to get clubbed by liberals for caving on the shutdown, the least Schumer could do to save a little face and soothe the progressive id would be to tear up the offer he made to Trump last Friday to carve out a few billion for the wall. Democrats just got thwarted on a DREAM amnesty; at a minimum, Schumer’s now obliged to thwart Trump on his big ask too.

Besides, leaving money for the wall on the table as a new round of negotiations begins would have been terrible bargaining strategy. Republicans would have treated that as Schumer’s baseline offer and sought to build on it by demanding additional concessions. With wall funding momentarily off limits, Schumer can “reset” the terms and force them to make some concessions of their own to entice him to put it back in the mix.

The Senate minority leader, through an aide, informed the White House on Monday that he was retracting the offer he made last week to give Trump well north of the $1.6 billion in wall funding Trump had asked for this year, according to two Democrats. And now they say Trump will simply not get a better deal than that on his signature campaign promise.

Schumer “took it off,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “He called the White House yesterday and said it’s over.”

In the now-infamous cheeseburger summit last Friday with Trump, Schumer offered a large increase in border wall spending as a condition for a broader deal to help Dreamers. But after that offer was rebuffed — prompting the three-day government shutdown — the president has now “missed an opportunity to get the wall,” one Democratic aide said.

Meh, it’s a bluff. If a DREAM amnesty happens, funding for the wall will be the absolute minimum that the GOP demands in return. In fact, House Republicans are busy today trying to force a “reset” of Republican demands as well: The Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus with more than 150 members, announced this morning that it’ll back Bob Goodlatte’s bill, which reads like a border-hawk wishlist — E-Verify, cuts to legal immigration, a crackdown on sanctuary cities, you name it. The chances that Democrats will agree to that are zero; in fact, the chances that *Senate Republicans* will agree to it are practically zero as well, since all it would take is Lindsey Graham, Jeff Flake, and one other immigration squish to vote in opposition to kill it even without a filibuster. But the RSC wants a vote on the bill in the House, where it’s likely to pass.

The glass-half-full view of that is that passage would maximize border hawks’ leverage in the next round of negotiations with Democrats by setting a baseline of robust enforcement. The glass-half-empty view is that passage would be destined to sink any bipartisan deals, even with Trump’s approval, because a compromise bill will pale by comparison. The Goodlatte bill will essentially operate as a reminder to populists of all the things Trump *could* be demanding, but isn’t, to tighten America’s borders when he starts negotiating with Schumer again. That’ll make life hard for him and McConnell.

As for Schumer, dopey progressives who refuse to grasp how little leverage he had in the shutdown standoff are planning to protest — at his home in New York City:

A trio of progressive organizations, including CREDO, is hosting an event on Tuesday night that will bring activists to the front lawn of Schumer’s home in Brooklyn. They are also in the process of printing signs for the event which read “Worst negotiator in Washington. And Brooklyn. #SchumerSellout,” superimposed on an image of the Minority Leader’s face.

“What we see strategically is that the fish rots from the top,” said Murshed Zaheed, political director and vice president of CREDO…

“We’re targeting Dems who voted for this CR (continuing resolution),” Angel Padilla, policy director for Indivisible, a resistance organization formed in response to Trump’s presidency, told The Daily Beast. “They sold out Dreamers. They failed to stand up to Trump’s white supremacy. They had the support of the grassroots and they caved. It also demonstrates that Democrats remain terrified of immigration. And they will continue to run from it.”

Thought experiment: Would the shutdown standoff have played out the same way if it were January 2020 instead of January 2018? The Senate map looks great for Democrats two years from now, with GOP incumbents forced to play defense in various purplish states. This year, though, it’s the opposite: With a few exceptions like Nevada and Arizona, most of the key races are being fought over Democrat-held seats in states won by Trump. Liberals shrieking about Schumer’s sellout are cutting him no slack for making a prudent move in ending the shutdown early: Knowing that Democrats have momentum in the polls, knowing that public reaction to shutdowns is unpredictable (especially in red states), he decided to take a knee and preserve the party’s lead rather than throw downfield by forcing a protracted shutdown over DREAM. He’s worried about those red-state Dems — and even if he wasn’t, those red-state Dems are worried enough about themselves that there was no guarantee they would have hung with Schumer day after day as a shutdown played out.

If McCaskill and Tester and Heitkamp and Donnelly, etc etc, ended up crossing the aisle and voting with Republicans to fund the government, progressives might have stupidly blamed them instead of Schumer, a potential disaster in November given how close their races are likely to be. Instead Schumer, whose own seat in New York is safe, became the lightning rod for liberal discontent. He failed, but at least he minimized the damage to his own caucus in doing so. For the moment.

Talk about miscalculations. Democrats went into the shutdown on Friday confident that the major media outlets would dutifully blame it on Republicans. When that didn’t work out, Chuck Schumer & Co must have figured that they would spin the retreat as a tactical advantage for Democrats. As Allahpundit pointed out this morning, that … didn’t work out so well.

But what about the progressive partisan media outlets that are ever-ready to backstop Democratic hardball? The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers puts his tongue firmly in cheek as he reviews all the helpful spin coming Schumer’s way on Chuck’s Buckle:

Democrats failed to secure long-term protection for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients in a bill that reopened the federal government Monday. Good thing Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and company have the liberal media to spin the deal as a win, with helpful headlines like these:

• Did Schumer cave on the shutdown? (New Yorker)
• Senate Democrats cave, provide votes based on McConnell’s empty promise (ThinkProgress)
• Liberal activists are furious that Democrats “caved” on the shutdown (Mother Jones)
• Schumer sells out the Resistance (New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg)
• What was the point of the government shutdown? (New Republic)

It’s getting ugly out there for a Democrat looking for political cover. Of these examples, the New Yorker offered perhaps the least judgmental view of the fallout, but still concludes that Schumer caved without getting anything in return:

Almost immediately, the Republicans (with glee) and the progressive left (with outrage) insisted that Schumer had “blinked” or “caved.” “That’s what they do,” the progressive Democratic congressman Luis Gutiérrez said, of the Senate Democrats. The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said, “We are pleased to see Senator Schumer accept the deal that President Trump put on the table at the beginning.” That overstated the White House’s role, but got the state of play right. Schumer had discovered the limits of his party’s influence and power.

This afternoon, the prospects for the Dreamers look worse: the immediate crisis of the shutdown has passed, the President no longer seems a plausible ally, and their status has not been secured. Republicans privately griped for the past week about the inconstancy of the White House, but this morning it was Schumer who was left complaining about the Presidential chaos. The Dreamers’ hopes, and his, had rested on a version of the President that did not materialize.

The Mother Jones analysis hints at a bigger problem for Democrats:

“Democrats caved on September 5th, they caved again on December 8th, they caved on December 22nd, and now they just caved again,” he said, pointing out that Democrats have now repeatedly agreed to short-term funding measures that don’t protect Dreamers. “Their promise is they’re really going to fight hard next time. It’s totally unbelievable. The idea that they are gonna take a pinky-swear promise from Sen. McConnell after he’s broken so many promises before is political malpractice—it’s absurd to believe that. The only answer is that [they] aren’t actually interested in fighting for the Dreamers.”

The end of the shutdown, weeks away from the beginning of primary season and a special congressional election in Pennsylvania, could have ripple effects at the grassroots level. Levin relayed a conversation he’d had over the weekend with the leader of an Indivisible chapter in a hotly contested House district. “I was wondering, ‘What am I actually knocking on doors for if they just kept on caving?’” she told him. “‘But then when they actually stood and fought on the [funding bill], it made me want to fight a lot harder.’”

“What they’ve done is taken away some of that energy,” Levin said.

Having discovered the limit of their power, Democrats will be loath to pull another shutdown stunt. And having discovered the power of demoralization on this issue, Republicans might be loath to pass a legislative version of DACA — at least not without a ton of concessions on border-wall funding and ending chain migration. The shutdown has left Democrats not just in a status quo ante position, but in a much worse bargaining position than before.

That was the predictable outcome of a shutdown strategy, especially over a non-budgetary issue. In my column for The Week, I remind readers that Republicans learned this lesson relatively cost-free in 2013, but that both parties should know now to pull that page out of their playbooks for good:

For the second time in a little over four years, the minority party in the Senate managed to grind the federal government to a halt. And for the second time in a little over four years, the minority party in the Senate has conceded an embarrassing defeat, having won nothing for its trouble.

When Republicans shuttered the government over Ted Cruz’s quixotic ObamaCare defunding effort in 2013, the party got nothing but egg on its face. The same is true today with regard to Democrats’ puzzling shutdown standoff over immigration. …

The lesson here is that voters don’t like having their government held hostage, especially for non-budgetary reasons. Most voters don’t immerse themselves in politics and its tribalist tendencies. They expect government to function properly where it’s necessary, to stay out of their lives where it’s not, and for elected officials to do their jobs. Government shutdowns over issues unrelated to the budget violate all of those expectations.

Now that both parties have humiliated themselves over this tactic, perhaps leaders in both parties will rip that page out of their playbooks.

If they do, at least something positive will have emerged from Chuck’s Buckle.