See what you did there as a “centrist democrat”? You took responsibility for the murderous policies of the republicans.

Not at all. I'm not taking responsibility for them. They are the ones who are responsible for their choices. But Democrats are responsible for their own choices as well.

If your party has the chance to stop the opposing party from doing a terrible thing, you're not absolving them of their own responsibility. But you do have the ability to act and stop the terrible thing from happening. In this case, the Democrats had their own choice to make: continue to press on in the shutdown knowing that it will result in the GOP causing people to go hungry, or to abandon pushing for the ACA subsidy expansion. The choices that the GOP has made are entirely their own fault and their own responsibility - but the Democrats are not without choice and agency, and they have to make the best choice for themselves as well.

Since there was very little chance that they would ever get the subsidy extension, it certainly seems to me like the least bad choice was to stop the shutdown. I totally get that reasonable minds can disagree about that, but I don't see that there was any plausible path to getting an extension into the current bill. The "theory of the case" was that the public would blame the Republicans and/or Trump - and while that was true to some extent, it wasn't true enough that the GOP had any real motivation to yield. Among people who didn't just blame both parties, the difference between those who blamed the GOP and those who blamed the Democrats just wasn't large enough to create any significant pressure on the GOP.

So let me ask you - what do you think would have happened if the Democrats continued to hold out? How do you see that ending that's different than this outcome?