Schumer caves on shutdown battle with GOP, clearing way for funding bill passage

“As bad as passing the CR is, allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option,” Schumer said in remarks on the Senate floor. “A shutdown would give Donald Trump the keys to the city, the country.”

Schumer had signaled in a private meeting on Thursday that he would support the procedural vote, as Democrats grapple with how to stop Trump’s sweeping actions to shrink the federal government.

“If we go into a shutdown, as I told my caucus this, there’s no offramp … how you stop a shutdown is totally determined by the Republican House and Senate,” Schumer said, speaking to reporters later Thursday evening. “They could keep us in a shutdown for months and months.”

Schumer said there is not yet an agreement with Republicans to fast-track the legislation, but said his preference would be to have an amendment vote on a 30-day continuing resolution.

“We worked extremely hard with Appropriations Committee members to get Republicans to go along with the 30-day bill, so they could actually do what they really like to do – which is to write a whole new appropriations bill, but they wouldn’t go along with it,” Schumer said.

He said he was still unsure whether there were enough Democratic votes to move forward with the spending bill, but stressed each member will make their own decision.

The episode caps off days of intense deliberations behind closed doors about which was the worse of two options for Democrats: being blamed for a government shutdown or caving to Republicans.

“There are no good choices,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), whose state is home to many federal workers who have been laid off under the federal workforce cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Many more workers could have been furloughed under a government shutdown.

“We are in a perverse bizarro land where we’re having to decide between letting Donald Trump wreck the government this way or wreck the government that way,” added Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), the No. 4 Democrat in Senate leadership.

Senate Democrats emerged from an hours-long meeting earlier on Thursday, their third in as many days, virtually united against providing Republicans the necessary votes to clear a 60-vote filibuster but with no clear solution on how to avert a shutdown.

Hours later, Schumer revealed that he would join Republicans on the funding bill despite it lacking Democratic input.

Many Senate Democrats dug in on demands for a 30-day stopgap, what appropriators on both sides of the aisle insisted was enough time to finish full-year budget talks. Democrats pointed the finger at Republicans, whom they say are unwilling to bring a month-long CR to the floor out of fear it would pass.

Schumer argued that a shutdown would have allowed Trump to “cherry pick which parts of the government to reopen” and which employees were essential and nonessential, further fueling his administration’s endeavor to slash federal employees.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said on Thursday that he was open to giving Democrats an amendment vote on their short-term proposal, but only after they help Republicans advance their version. Republicans only control the chamber by 53 votes, while Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a fiscal hawk, plans to oppose the GOP’s CR.

It was not immediately clear whether the Senate planned to take the amendment vote, which would fail.

“Who’s in charge of the House?” Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) asked reporters, as he sought to blame shutdown anxieties on the GOP’s control over Washington. “Who’s in charge of the Senate? Who’s in charge of the White House?”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) equated siding with Republicans as creating a “slush fund for Donald Trump” that “may give him unbridled discretion” with spending authorities to undermine Congress’s power of the purse. But the competing argument among Democrats was that Trump is already flouting the law with uniliteral cuts to the federal workforce, agencies, and programs.

A shutdown, some Democrats feared, would only fuel Trump’s ability to ignore Congress.

“They are both potential licenses for illegal action on the part of Donald Trump,” Blumenthal added.

The GOP-led House passed its CR, which largely extends current government funding levels but raises defense spending by about $8 billion and lowers nondefense by roughly $13 billion, on Tuesday before departing for a recess. The move effectively jammed the Senate, preventing any changes against the backdrop of a looming shutdown.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) was the first among his peers to side with Republicans if it meant averting a shutdown, despite his opposition to the GOP’s funding bill.

“Any party should never shut the government down. That’s front and center. That’s politics 101. For me, I would think if we do that, that would be a gift for the Republicans,” Fetterman said. “Millions and millions of Americans are going to be impacted by shutting the government down.”

Campaign politics have already crept into the debate, ratcheting up potential political consequences for vulnerable Democratic senators up for reelection next year like Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA).

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN: WHAT HAPPENS IF CONGRESS DOESN’T PASS A STOPGAP SPENDING BILL

Nick Puglia, a regional press secretary for the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, said in a statement that if those like Ossoff “want to move forward with a Schumer Shutdown, they will own the consequences.”

“I think they’ll cave,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) predicted prior to Schumer’s remarks. “You’re talking about people who have been railing against Elon Musk and the Trump administration over reductions in force of the federal employees, and now they basically want to put all of them out of work by shutting down the government. I don’t know how you reconcile those two positions.”