Eight Senate Democrats are leading America on a spelunking tour. They desperately point out all the wonderful natural features of the cavern to everyone, as they lead us all lower and lower beneath the ground. However, to the rest of their Democratic colleagues (and millions of Democratic voters), no natural formation or mineral oddity can distract from seeing the truth of the situation as just a handful of weak "moderates" completely caving.

That's about as politely as I can put it. Last night, the Senate held a vote that will facilitate an end to the longest government shutdown in history. This was shocking for several reasons, the biggest of which being the Democrats caved even though they were largely winning the fight. In the battle for public opinion, the blame had fallen mostly on Donald Trump and the Republicans and not on the Democrats. That is a rare feat for the party which triggered the shutdown -- usually it is the other way around.

This was an odd shutdown because people have become so inured to the concept of a government shutdown that most people didn't even pay attention during the first month of it. Federal workers who weren't being paid knew about it (painfully), of course, but the average American voter simply wasn't that affected by it and reacted mostly with a big shrug.

That was beginning to change, in a big way. The court battles over SNAP payments (food stamps), together with the slowdown at America's airports had really just begun to raise the shutdown fight to the level where people were indeed beginning to both pay attention to it and be directly impacted by it. Which is why it is so odd that this was the time when the eight Democrats decided to cave.

The other odd thing is that Democrats truly had the wind at their back after a blowout off-off-year election, with the voting public expressing their support in dramatic fashion. It would have been a lot more understandable to see Democrats cave if they had lost these elections -- because then they would obviously have been in a very weak spot. But the opposite was true, making the timing almost inexplicable.

The Democrats who caved got almost nothing for capitulating. They essentially agreed to what the Republicans have been offering all along -- a floor vote (to be held later) on their key ask (expansion of the Obamacare subsidies), in exchange for voting now to reopen the government. The only concessions they got (and it's hard to even call them that) were that federal workers would get their back pay (which was already mandated by law) and that the people Trump fired would be reinstated at their jobs (unless he decides to renege on that part of it, of course).

There was even another option for the caving Democrats -- they could have done precisely what Republicans had been asking and passed the continuing resolution that the House had already passed, while getting their guarantee of a future vote on the Obamacare subsidies. This would have put an enormous amount of pressure on the Republicans, because the deadline of this continuing resolution was set at only November 21st. So if no vote was held before Thanksgiving, Democrats could have shrugged their shoulders and shut down the government again -- right before the holiday, and with time still left to pass the subsidies before January (when the higher insurance rates kick in). Instead, they agreed to a different continuing resolution that punts the deadline out to January.

So who were these spelunking Democrats? Well, actually there were only seven of them, because one (Angus King) is officially an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats. And three of them had been voting with the Republicans all along, so it really boiled down to just five new senators who decided that it was time to explore a big old cave.

Here is the full list, complete with when they will be facing their own voters again:

• Dick Durbin (is not running for re-election next year)
• Jeanne Shaheen (is not running for re-election next year)
• Catherine Cortez Masto (2028)
• John Fetterman (2028)
• Maggie Hassan (2028)
• Tim Kaine (2030)
• Angus King (2030)
• Jackie Rosen (2030)

You will note that this means that none of them will be on the ballot in next year's midterms. They are all doubtlessly hoping that by the time they do face the voters again, that this spelunking exercise will have been forgotten by their constituents. We'll have to see how long the memories of the voters are, in New Hampshire (Hassan), Maine (King), Nevada (both Cortez Masto and Rosen), Pennsylvania (Fetterman), and Virginia (Kaine), but my guess is that any primary opponent will likely spend some campaign advertising dollars reminding the voters of what just happened.

As mentioned, three of these (Cortez Masto, Fetterman, and King) have been voting with the Republicans all along. At least they can claim consistency (in spelunking). The other five, however, all switched their votes last night after spending more than a month voting with the rest of their party's caucus.

And for what? For the mere promise to hold a vote in the Senate on some unspecified bill. The House speaker has not agreed to hold a vote in his chamber, it is worth mentioning. And any such bill will face long odds since it'll have to clear the 60-vote hurdle to pass in the Senate. That means getting every Democrat to vote for it as well as 13 Republicans, which is a pretty daunting task. If this magically happens and if Speaker Mike Johnson does actually hold a vote in the House and the measure is passed (another daunting task), then there will be nothing to stop Donald Trump from vetoing it. Getting a veto-proof majority in both houses is so far-fetched it's barely even worth mentioning.

The pushback from Democrats has already begun. The eight spelunkers are being excoriated by other Democratic politicians (House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been particularly scathing), as well as the voting public who had been supporting the Democrats' shutdown efforts all along. In New Hampshire, the most personal blowback came from Jeanne Shaheen's own daughter, who is running for a vacant House seat "on a health care platform." Of her mom's vote, Stefany Shaheen said: "Clearly we had different approaches here. I can't speak for her."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is getting some fierce blowback as well, even though he voted against the deal (and voiced his objections to it on the Senate floor). His leadership is being called into question, since he was not able to hold his caucus together. There are calls for him to step down. Representative Ro Khanna was explicit, saying Schumer "is no longer effective and should be replaced.... If you can't lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?" The chair of the Democratic National Committee weighed in (which is notable, since the party leader usually steers clear of commenting on such intraparty divisions), saying: "I stand with Democratic leadership as they refuse to rubber stamp the full-scale Republican assault on Americans' health care and I am proud of the majority of Senate Democrats who opposed this vote. The voters will never forget the day Trump turned his back on them so he could focus on building his gilded ballroom." And this is just a sampling of the rage now boiling over in the Democratic Party, I should mention.

For once, this was an issue that both progressives and even many moderates agreed upon. Representative Greg Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said: "Republicans want health care cuts. Accepting nothing but a pinky promise from Republicans isn't a compromise -- it's capitulation. Millions of families would pay the price." Senator Bernie Sanders was even more scathing: "To my mind, this was a very, very bad vote.... Just on Tuesday, we had a election all over this country, and what the election showed is that the American people want us to stand up to Trumpism, to his war against working-class people, to his authoritarianism. Tonight, that is not what happened." Moderate Representative Jake Auchincloss weighed in with: "Democrats must stop playing by the old rules in a broken Congress. If it comes to the House, I'm a No."

Politically, the upshot of all of this may wind up helping the Democratic Party next year. If the effort to pass an extension of the Obamacare subsidies does manage to pass (and Trump actually signs it and implements it), then perhaps the voters will see it as a big victory for the party. But if the much-more-likely result is that no bill passes both chambers of commerce, then Democrats can tell the voters: "We tried, but failed, to stop the price of health insurance premiums from skyrocketing. The Republican Party owns those increases -- they are the ones who took affordable healthcare away from you." This fits in with the Democratic theme of fighting hard for "affordability" in a big way, and it channels the rage millions of families will be feeling when they have to drop their health insurance towards the people who bear all the responsibility. This could be not just a big issue in the midterms but indeed the main plank in the Democratic platform. Democrats fought hard to avoid pain and fear and misery for millions of Americans, but the Republican-led Congress and Donald Trump won in the end. The only way to fix this is to elect more Democrats to Congress, obviously. But that's only a silver lining to a very dark cloud those millions of Americans will face, come January.

When all is said and done, you can pretend to dress up what just happened in the Senate with the fancy term "spelunking," but when it gets right down to it, caving is caving. And that's precisely what eight Senate Democrats just did.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant