When it comes to Congress, a divided house isn’t a bug, it’s a feature — and that apparently holds true for mothers and daughters inside the Beltway.
In a striking example of Democratic infighting, New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and her daughter, House candidate Stefany Shaheen, publicly split over the recent government funding deal that ended the shutdown.
The senior Shaheen took to X to praise the Senate vote that reopened the government, calling it “a big step forward towards protecting the health care of tens of millions of Americans.”
I voted tonight to reopen the government and take action to protect health care for tens of millions of Americans. Here’s why: pic.twitter.com/AWFnqHVBjK
— Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (@SenatorShaheen) November 10, 2025
But her daughter, running for a seat in New Hampshire, quickly fired back with a very different message — one that implicitly criticized both the deal and the party leadership behind it.
Improving health care has been the cause of my life. It’s why I am running for congress. So I cannot support this deal when Speaker Johnson refuses to even allow a vote to extend health care tax credits. My statement: pic.twitter.com/UPdGXcb6wb
— Stefany Shaheen (@Stefany4NH) November 10, 2025
“Improving health care has been the cause of my life,” Stefany Shaheen wrote. “So I cannot support this deal when Speaker Johnson refuses to even allow a vote to extend health care tax credits.”
Did the Democrats cause the government shutdown for political reasons?
That statement put her at odds not only with Republicans, but with her own mother — who helped broker and defend the very compromise Stefany rejected.
For Democrats, the optics could hardly be worse: a high-profile senator celebrating the end of a shutdown, while her daughter insists the same deal fails working families.
Sen. Shaheen framed her support as a pragmatic step. “Let’s be clear: This is a major step that was not predetermined,” she said, arguing that Republicans had refused to tie any shutdown resolution to new health care tax credit extensions.
But critics noted that this “major step” amounted to yet another Democratic concession — reopening government without securing a single lasting reform, bringing into question the entire point of the original shutdown, outside of boosting Dem performances during the special elections last Tuesday.
Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, stood firm in negotiations, insisting that budget talks focus on fiscal responsibility, not on expanding Obama-era subsidies through the Affordable Care Act.
To many conservatives, Johnson’s approach was not obstruction, but governance: separating budgetary necessity from endless policy wish lists.
Stefany Shaheen’s statement, however, underscored how deeply the Democratic base remains wedded to the ACA and the perpetual expansion of government-run benefits.
Her call for “no deal” unless new subsidies were included struck many observers as a tone-deaf echo of progressive hardliners in Washington, who seem comfortable extending a shutdown for leverage.
Meanwhile, Sen. Shaheen’s willingness to cut a deal reflected the opposite impulse — a seasoned Democrat eager to claim credit for bipartisanship even as her party fractures over priorities.
That family-level divide mirrors a broader national trend: establishment Democrats scrambling to appear pragmatic, while younger or more activist voices demand ideological purity.
Republicans, for their part, are seizing on the moment as proof that Democrats can’t even agree within their own households about what governing looks like.
If nothing else, the spectacle of a senator and her daughter publicly disagreeing over a shutdown deal serves as a vivid reminder: the Democratic Party’s biggest fight right now isn’t with Republicans — it’s with itself.
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