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UPDATE: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that he would vote for cloture on the House government funding bill in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon. Democrats have made the calculation that eliminating themselves as a governmental partner is preferable to putting up a fight. I hope they enjoy their recess. You can read this story on the stakes below.
The headline is hard to ignore. “Trump crafts plan to cut spending without Congress after shutdown is averted,” according to Fox News. The idea is that Congress would send the House-passed continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year to the president—with the participation of Senate Democrats—and Donald Trump and his minions would just rip it up and decide unilaterally what they wanted to spend money on.
This is no big secret; it’s one of the signature pillars of Project 2025, the years-in-the-making brainchild of Russ Vought to centralize all federal spending in the executive branch. But when you say it so brazenly out loud, and when in particular say that this will get started just as soon as Congress sends over that bill before the March 14 deadline, Senate Democrats, who were plotting an open secret of their own, might take notice.
If they grudgingly sign off on a federal funding bill, only to see it torn apart unilaterally by Trump, something that their constituents have been screaming would happen, they’d look like complete saps. And while Democrats are too often comfortable with that reality, this time at least some appear to have awoken from their slumber. We’ll see if it’s enough.
Prior to this, they were poised to try a throwback maneuver that some call Kabuki theater, but that I have called “pulling a Lieberman,” after the former Connecticut for Lieberman party senator. Democrats were angling to get a vote on an amendment for a 30-day clean continuing resolution to fund the government, giving time for appropriators to reach a bipartisan agreement. In exchange, they would give enough votes to move forward to break a filibuster. That amendment would fail, and then Republicans would need only 50 votes for final passage. Even if every Democrat performatively voted against the bill then, their collaboration in letting it pass would be clear.
And for reasons I’ve made clear, that would be kind of the end of Congress as a coequal branch of government, because the House-passed CR doesn’t contain any guarantees that the spending in it will actually be spent; in fact, it actually makes it easier for Trump and Elon Musk to shift around and cancel spending.
But Republicans got greedy. They started gabbing to reporters, boasting that Democrats were “totally screwed” and would swallow the CR wholesale. They started taunting Democrats about impounding spending as soon as the CR got to Trump’s desk.
So Democrats checked the rules and found out they could actually just vote no. Of the key nine senators I identified a couple of days ago who might be willing to vote to advance the House CR, five have publicly stated their opposition. Importantly, Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), and Mark Warner (D-VA) have all stated that they are nos on cloture. That’s a no on pulling a Lieberman.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who runs the campaign arm of the Democrats, is apparently the ringleader for caving and avoiding a shutdown. But there may not be enough votes for pulling a Lieberman. Josh Marshall has a running cloture tally.
If enough Senate Democrats reasonably decide that they don’t want to make themselves irrelevant in the constitutional order, we will have a government shutdown, and a showdown between the parties. Let’s tick through the arguments on what happens next.
There’s a strain of thought that Trump and Musk relish this moment. They’ve been shutting parts of the government down anyway, and without available funds they could continue the job. It could even lead to permanent cuts; there’s a provision for layoffs if the shutdown lasts longer than 30 days. And the Office of Management and Budget, along with the Department of Government Efficiency, would get to control who stays and who goes. That’s what Gillibrand was shouting at the Senate lunch today, arguing that “this will not be a normal shutdown.”
Of course, what are we dealing with right now? DOGE and OMB are controlling who stays and who goes right now. Musk has reduced federal credit card limits to $1. He’s destroyed several agencies and canceled appropriated spending. There are lawsuits trying to stop all this, and passing a bill that gives the president flexibility to move around or cut spending harms those lawsuits. If Congress signed off on the kinds of things DOGE is doing, that offers a powerful legal talking point, as Norm Eisen says.
As for who would get blamed for a shutdown, Republicans control all phases of government and have spent the first two months of the Trump era … systematically shutting down the government! The Democratic brand, such as it is, defends the notion of government, and preventing the unilateral weakening of it aligns with that. The idea that Democrats would be blamed for this strikes me as absurd; only the most partisan Republicans would believe that.
The ostrich approach from Democratic politicians has led to an inexorable fight in the courts that sooner or later will prompt Trump to ignore them; in many cases, he has already. The way to change this dynamic is with an opposition party showing that there’s an actual debate going on, starting with an unwillingness to feed their own institution into a wood chipper.
Republicans wrote a partisan funding bill and are demanding that Democrats accept it. There are surely some risks to Democrats saying no, but they are outweighed by the current risks of the status quo, where agencies just get bulldozed one by one. Giving an effective go-ahead for that would be lunacy, a climbdown of the power of the opposition party, something that would be repeated over and over for the next four years as we creep into autocracy. Let’s find out if enough Democrats agree.
UPDATE: I do not think our Democrats is learning. There are apparently private indications that several will cave and support cloture. If they do, they might as well support the bill, too, because nobody is buying the Kabuki theater. A list of likely Democratic votes include senators who are retiring and therefore unaccountable (Shaheen, Peters), a handful of the moderates everyone feared would cave (Fetterman, Hassan, King), and then the Democratic leadership (Schumer, Durbin, Schatz, Gillibrand), with maybe a couple of wild cards. The point is that the leadership is pushing this over the line. When they get to go home after everything is all done, they should stay there.
