Just how desperate are Democrats to score any kind of legislative win ahead of the midterms? Desperate enough to throw in the towel on federal funding for abortions, reports Politico. The Hyde Amendment will get included in the next funding bill after all, leaving Democrats the task of explaining this to their hardline pro-abortion base:

Though Democrats won’t publicly admit it, they’re soon set to concede defeat on federal funding for abortion.

After months of tense negotiations, the two parties joined together last week on a government spending framework they insist will swiftly lead to a massive deal to boost agency bottom lines into the fall. Officially, they’re agreeing to save specific policy disputes for later, including the longtime debate over the half-century ban on federal funding for abortions, known as the Hyde amendment. But Republicans are already declaring victory in that battle.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), his party’s top appropriator in the Senate, said after that cross-party accord that the Hyde amendment “absolutely” needs to be included, or else Democrats won’t get the Republican support they need to pass the bill through the 50-50 Senate. …

Shelby is saying plainly what Democrats have known since they locked up control of Washington last year: Their promise of finally kicking the decades-old ban on abortion funding is almost certain to fail due to Senate Republicans, like so many of their other policy ambitions. In the case of the Hyde amendment, President Joe Biden will likely have to approve an extension of a funding ban that he told Democratic primary voters he “could no longer continue to abide by.”

This is a bad season for flopping on progressive promises. Not only do Democrats need some enthusiasm rolling into the midterms, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe and Casey in their upcoming decision on Dobbs. Technically speaking, Dobbs won’t impact the Hyde Amendment restrictions in any direction, since the Supreme Court won’t forbid abortions or abortion funding in this case. However, a loss in Dobbs will make progressives even angrier at Democrats while Joe Biden and his team have yet another failure on a dumb and unrealistic promise.

How unrealistic? Despite the framing provided by Politico, the issue here isn’t just the Republicans. During last summer’s budget negotiations, Senate Democrat Joe Manchin insisted that the Hyde Amendment and its example of bipartisan compromise had to remain in place:

Sens. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., sent a bipartisan letter to the leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee urging them to protect the Hyde Amendment and maintain this “long-standing provision” in the Fiscal Year 2022 bill.

The senators crossed the aisle in a letterto both Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and ranking member Richard Shelby, R-Ala., expressing their “support for the Hyde Amendment.”

Wicker and Manchin noted the amendment “has been included in annual appropriations bills on a bipartisan basis since 1976” and has been a “decades-long, consensus-building compromise” before calling for its inclusion in the budget.

“Repealing this provision,” Manchin and Wicker wrote, ” would eliminate over 40 years of bipartisan precedent.” Attempting to eliminate it over Manchin’s objections would leave Senate Democrats with only 49 votes, not enough to pass a Hyde-less budget bill even in reconciliation.

In other words, the writing has been on the wall since Chuck Schumer got control of the Senate in January 2021. So why have Democrats continued to stoke expectations that they would finally uncork Medicaid funding for abortion on demand? The same reason that Schumer and the Senate progressives kept insisting that they would pass a massive progressive spend-o-rama in reconciliation in the midst of a massive inflation wave, and pledging they would eliminate the filibuster. They either can’t do math, or they’re too afraid to tell the truth and set expectations more rationally.

That leaves Democrats in a very bad position if the Supreme Court delivers the expected result in Dobbs. They will have lost on all fronts, largely because they keep overpromising and underdelivering to their Academia elite while ignoring the real economic issues of the working class. As a result, they’ll have almost no one to come to their rescue in November … except the hope of hand-overplaying Republicans.