Schumer said a shutdown would give Trump free rein

The Senate has voted to advance a spending bill to keep the government open despite the majority of Democrats objecting to the legislation as an overly partisan bill. All but one Republican senator, Rand Paul voted for the bill, along with nine Democrats, which proved to be enough to break a filibuster. House Republicans passed the bill on an almost exclusively party-line vote, with many House Democrats objecting to the spending cuts and the fact that it was negotiated without them, criticisms also leveled by Democrats in the Senate. Many Senate Democrats came out against the bill on Thursday before Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would vote to support the continuing resolution that evening.

“We had a Hobson’s choice, an awful CR bill that had no democratic input, very bad bill,” Schumer told reporters on Thursday evening. “But the other choice was having a shutdown. I think that would be the far worse choice.”

Schumer said that a shutdown would give President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, free rein to make cuts that could be even more draconian than the ones in the stopgap spending bill.

Rand Paul

“In effect, a shutdown gives Trump and his minions keys to the city and the country,” he said. “And I thought that had to be avoided.”

But many Democrats still opposed the legislation. On Thursday evening, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar held a press conference before the vote where Jeffries repeatedly dodged when asked about whether he continued to have faith in Schumer. Schumer’s decision did little to quell the rebellion, as many Democrats from battleground states came out against the legislation.

“If I weren’t a preacher, I’d tell you what kind of ‘no,’” Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia told The Independent. Specifically, Warnock criticized cuts to veterans care. “It looks like our military men and women are yet one more casualty on the way to making sure that the billionaires get everything they want.” The legislation would keep the government open until the end of September, the close of the fiscal year. Democrats had hoped to put a 30-day continuing resolution on the floor to allow for spending bills to be negotiated in a bipartisan way. The passage of the continuing resolution gives Democrats one less piece of leverage to use against Donald Trump and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

Schumer had argued that over time, Democrats would have more leverage as Trump’s popularity continues to decline amid his escalating trade war with Canada, Mexico and Europe, and as the economic outlook grows increasingly grim, an idea Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia echoed.

“When those local communities have put up their share of the dough, doesn’t have a project come through, I think that a lot of this is going to start bubbling up from Republican officials,” Warner told The Independent. Warner and his fellow Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia opposed the legislation due to cuts in the federal workforce that hurt federal employees in their state.

“Overwhelmingly, the people reaching out to our office are ‘thank you for saying that,’” Kaine told The Independent. Kaine said that many U.S. government employees’ are relieved when they have heard their jobs have not been slashed by DOGE.

“Usually uncertainty is bad, but uncertainty is about the most optimistic thing I hear from people these days,” he said. “’My project hadn’t been canceled yet, but I’m worried that it will be.’”

House Republicans had passed the spending bill with only one Democratic vote and one defection earlier this week as a way to get around the normal appropriations process, which likely would have required them to work with Democrats and would have caused conservatives to vote against the legislation.