It’s an age of remakes: If the past few months have been a restaging of the 2011 debt ceiling drama, we’ve already got the cast and crew set for a new version of 2013’s fiscal cliff catastrophe.

For now, the Biden administration will surely invite the comparison to 2011, where the Obama administration got bludgeoned in negotiations with the GOP, setting back the country’s economic recovery a decade. Biden made out much better than that; according to Politico his team privately views the deal as “a substantial victory” over their Republican sparring partners.

But they still don’t want to message it as a partisan, Democratic win. Instead, they’re trying to project Biden as a sane and steadyhanded bipartisan navigator in an uncertain time, hovering above it all. “Biden’s advisers are betting that voters will reward him for getting a big thing done in a bipartisan fashion,” according to the Politico story. “Biden world wanted to emerge from the process with the public perception of being the ‘adults in the room.’”

This makes no sense and is terrible politics. Biden has been at his most popular and effective when scoring party-line Democratic victories, and calling out Republicans for their assault on democracy and their willingness to cut Social Security and Medicare and illegalize abortion. Reverting back to messaging about how he can work with these people alienates the base Biden desperately needs for reelection and doesn’t pass basic argumentative muster. It made no sense in 2022 and 2021 before that.

And this deal may not be a crushing loss, but it is not a victory. The cuts are meaningful and will be felt by Americans around the country. On climate, on student debt, and on welfare, there is real retrenchment. Perhaps even more importantly, they’ve given the GOP a foothold from which to further attack these flagship programs. And if the Republicans win big in 2024, there is no doubt that they will.

Billions of dollars are going away from things like modernizing the welfare program and cracking down on tax cheats, which minimizes inequality. Billions are flowing towards things like new fossil fuel infrastructure. Over 100,000 jobs will be lost due to spending cuts. These are not nothing, even though Democrats would like them to be. Intelligencer’s Jonathan Chait decisively cuts through this ridiculous spin; if the president signs a bill that only undoes things moderates purport to care about, it is not a win for moderates just because progressives are unhappy.

After many late nights and much heartburn, many Democrats would like to simply go home and let the newly pacified (if not yet sleeping) dogs lie. But, to borrow a Bidenism, the job is not finished. Biden and Democrats need to start working now at something the Obama administration was never willing or able to commit to—figuring out a solution to defuse these sorts of threats and negotiations for good. The two-year clock is running to get a 14^thamendment case solidified or a coin minted or some other workaround to get Democrats out of these made-up procedural handcuffs. It’s not enough to say, “vote for us in 2024 and this rigged bomb will not explode.” Defuse the bomb now; there are other, better ways to win reelection.

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Speaking of which, Chuck Schumer also owes us an explanation. In December, Democrats controlled the House and had the votes to raise the debt ceiling at zero cost to their agenda and the well-being of the American poor. They didn’t do it. Schumer has said, even recently, that that was because they didn’t have the votes in the Senate to get it done, that there were three or four Democratic dissenters who quashed the deal.

We can guess who one of them might be, a certain West Virginia moderate up for reelection who got his personal pipeline smuggled into this debt ceiling deal. But the other two or three are not known. Schumer maintained their anonymity by never even bringing a clean hike to a vote in December, and he’s protecting them now. Why? Democratic voters deserve to know why their party is working with Republicans to kick needy Americans off of food stamps.

The long-term health of the party and its agenda, not to mention the country itself, is still at stake here. Finish the job, and then, for the love of God, let’s move on to something else.

• Chuck Schumer
• Congress
• Democrats
• Joe Biden
• Politics
• Republicans
• Senate
• Kevin McCarthy