Politics & Power Quote by Debbie Wasserman Schultz

The line is built to sound like grown-up governance while quietly assigning blame. Wasserman Schultz casts Democrats as already seated at the "compromise table" - a familiar civic prop in Washington rhetoric - and then turns the image into a physical indictment: the chair is "cold" because Republican leadership hasn't shown up. It's a neat bit of staging. If you're waiting at the table, you look patient, reasonable, and ready; if the other side isn't there, they look unserious without her needing to call them extremists outright.

The metaphor does extra work because it's domestic and bodily. Politics becomes a room you can picture, a chair you can warm. That concreteness softens what is essentially a hard message: Republicans are blocking progress. "They still have time" adds the parental note of a deadline and a moral frame. The debate isn't just tactical; it's about "the right thing" and "responsible" behavior, terms that smuggle in a hierarchy of maturity.

Context matters: this is Obama-era congressional brinkmanship language, designed for moments when budgets, debt ceilings, or shutdown threats make Washington look dysfunctional. She isn't persuading Republicans so much as narrating the stalemate for the public and the press, pre-empting the "both sides" storyline by showing asymmetry: one party waiting, the other drifting "further and further away". The repetition of distance turns disagreement into a slow-motion abandonment, implying that the GOP isn't negotiating in good faith and may be captive to its own hardliners.