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For weeks, Senate Democrats have tried to have it both ways as they’ve faced a tricky choice: cast a vote that allows for a government shutdown in hopes of saving some federal jobs or give into Republicans’ spending regime in the name of keeping the lights on.
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To the dismay of the progressive wing of the party, it seems retreat remains a very real option. Already, some Democrats are suggesting the hardline opposition ultimately does more harm than good, with a shutdown fight unwinnable for a party in the minority against a unified GOP majority. Others are staying vague, hoping this sorts itself out without laying down hard markers.
To put it mildly, the indignation is real but a remedy is missing.
Lawmakers face a deadline at the end of the week to adopt a spending program or trigger a government shutdown. In normal times, the party in control of Congress and the White House would be stuck holding the bag. But the Republican majority in the Senate is insufficient to pass this on their own under the chamber’s rules, leaving Democrats as the deciding factor between keeping the lights on or not.
No vote has been scheduled but the ambiguity emanating from senior Democrats in recent days is widely seen as giving cover to vulnerable lawmakers to begrudgingly support Republicans’ plans to cut topline, non-defense spending by about $13 billion and boost defense spending by about $6 billion, all while giving Trump even greater powers to reprogram money as he sees fit. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Republican framework does not have enough Democratic votes to clear the bar. Instead, he proposed a stopgap spending plan by way of a continuing resolution.
“Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House C.R. Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11 C.R. that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass,” Schumer said.
Democrats are also looking for an ability to offer amendments to the House version as a trade for support, a Hill aide said.
The proposal, coming after Democrats had a second all-hands, closed-door meeting about in as many days, was instantaneously a non-starter among Republicans, who still expect Democrats to cave to dodge a shutdown.
Democratic strategists are decidedly mixed on what the smart play here is. The party has yet to really pick itself up after the 2024 loss to Trump, leaving many in doubt that it’s ready to effectively defend a shutdown as Republicans’ fault. The Resistance has not materialized and a grand strategy to stop Trump has not manifested. A unified message has yet to show up.
To that last point, just consider the misfires this week. On Tuesday, as Trump turned the South Lawn into a Tesla showroom, the Democratic National Committee’s main social media account skipped right past the President’s blatant promotion of Elon Musk’s embattled company and fed the troll: “Ugly ass truck.” Whereas the party was once quick to decry a White House official’s promotion of Ivanka Trump’s shoes at Nordstrom’s, it was less prepared to harness the outrage over Trump personally pitching his top political patron’s electric vehicles.
In the end, the President is in the driver’s seat of both Washington and, apparently, a Tesla he bought to help his buddy. Confident that almost every Republican in Congress will do what he wants, he pushed for both House Speaker Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune to stop playing footsie with Democrats in exchange for their votes to offset GOP defections.
So far, that strategy has been proven right. House Republicans suffered just one defection on Tuesday despite very, very public complaints from GOP lawmakers about the package being pushed forward. (One Democrat who represents a district Trump carried, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, broke with his party’s instructions to be unified in opposition.)
“It’s not like there’s a Plan B behind door number two,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise admonished on the House floor on Tuesday ahead of the vote, calling on his people to realize the stakes if the plan coming to a vote came up short.
The GOP unity meant House Democrats had little power to shape the spending plan beyond a name-and-shame posture. That left Democrats as less-than-unified in their general messaging and again looking to voters like a scattershot collection of grievances rather than anything approaching a party with a central spine.
Democrats’ impotence had no clearer moment of illustration than Republicans’ willingness to change the rules to avoid a tough vote in the next few weeks. Trump is running his trade war using emergency powers under a crisis, but Congress has the power to withdraw those powers by declaring an end to the emergency. Democrats had hoped they could avail themselves of a provision that requires a fast-track vote within 18 working days in the full House, but Republicans got wind of it and tucked a novel footnote into the spending plan: for the purposes of that law, everything between now and the start of 2026 will be considered just one day of legislation. No, really. We are about to be living the longest legislative day in history.
Both parties in the House recognized the futility of dragging out the inevitability of the GOP-powered spending bill and were more than willing to evacuate Washington early to return to their districts, effectively shutting the door to any more work on this project. From the House’s perspective, the take-it-or-leave-it strategy absolves them of responsibility if things blow apart in the Senate.
That now forces the hand of Senators from both parties, none of whom are big fans of having to accept the House’s work product without an opportunity to tweak it. Anything the Senate changes would require the House to accept them or negotiate fixes, and the House is simply not here to take up that task before the Friday deadline.
Senate Republicans have spotted the political perils baked into the House version of this spending package. Yet with the lone exception of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the GOP conference seemed poised to be behind it. That means the measure needs eight Democratic votes to get over the 60-vote threshold needed in the Senate rules, and there are signs they could get there if taken to the brink.
Many Senate Democrats have, to a tee, put off questions about their plans. The issue still seemed an open question on Tuesday after lawmakers met for two hours in private, where emotions ran hot but answers came up dry. Some pretended that Johnson might abandon an all-GOP plan and work with House Democrats to get their votes for—and ideas into—a revised plan. Others thought they’d be able to keep current spending levels in place with just a few tweaks, leaving Joe Biden-era contours in place.
But, after Tuesday’s House vote, Senators returned to the Capitol on Wednesday without that offramp. They faced what more than one office described as a choice with just two bad options: surrender to the House GOP funding scheme or be blamed for the shutdown.
For Senate Democrats, the GOP plan is painful to swallow. There were ready-made political hits aplenty in the outline. Some would make for great campaign dings next year, but it may be tough to savage Republicans for legislation Democrats helped deliver to Trump’s desk.
While some will surely debate whether Democrats are really to blame if the government shuts down at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, many in the party fear they will lose that argument in the court of public opinion. After spending the past few weeks defending the broad sweep of government services as worthwhile and essential, a muddled Democratic Party is not likely to have an easy answer to the question of why, then, they allowed the whole thing to go dark.
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