The Constitution gives Congress the primary power to control government spending, and the narrative at the beginning of last week was that Democrats would stand together to preserve the separation of power by rejecting the House GOP bill to fund the government through September.
The GOP lawmakers supporting the bill and Democrats opposing it gave the same reason, The New York Times noted. They said the stopgap bill gave President Trump latitude to continue his campaign to dismantle and defund major pieces of the federal government through Elon Musk’s DOGE.
On Tuesday, March 11, the House passed the GOP bill with the support of all but one Republican and just one Democrat.
But also on Tuesday, Wired reported that Musk actually “wanted a government shutdown — an aim that runs contrary to the White House’s stated desire to avoid one — in part because it would potentially make it easier to eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, essentially achieving a permanent shutdown.”
On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor that Republicans lacked the 60 votes needed to get to debate on the House bill and called for a bill to keep the government open for another month to give Congress “time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass.”
On Thursday, Schumer said on the Senate floor that Republicans had rejected his proposal for negotiations. And that he would oppose a government shutdown, backing passage of the House-passed bill.
There was a “torrent of frustration and anger” after Schumer’s announcement, including calls that he be primaried in 2028, says The Associated Press.
The most detailed explanation of Schumer’s reasoning that I’ve seen is what he told Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Saturday:
“I think it was a very, very difficult decision between two bad options, a partisan Republican C.R. [continuing resolution] and a shutdown that Musk and Trump wanted. For me, the shutdown of the government would just be devastating and far worse than the Republican C.R. Let me explain: A shutdown would shut down all government agencies, and it would solely be up to Trump and DOGE and Musk what to open again, because they could determine what was essential. So their goal of decimating the whole federal government, of cutting agency after agency after agency, would occur under a shutdown. Two days from now in a shutdown, they could say, well, food stamps for kids is not essential. It’s gone. All veterans offices in rural areas are gone. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. They’re not essential. We’re cutting them back. So it’d be horrible. The damage they can do under a shutdown is much worse than any other damage that they could do.
“One of the Republican senators told us: We go to a shutdown, it’s going to be there for six months, nine months, a year. And by then, their goal of destroying the federal government would be gone. And finally, one final point here, and that is that right now under the C.R., you can go to court and contest an executive order to shut something down. Under a shutdown, the executive branch has sole power. So, in conclusion, I knew this would be an unpopular decision. I knew that. I know politics. But I felt so strongly as a leader that I couldn’t let this happen because weeks and months from now, things would be far worse than they even are today, that I had to do what I had to do.
“We’ve had government shutdowns before, but never against such nihilists, such anti-government fanatics as Trump, DOGE, Musk. They’ve given us a playbook, by the way. [Russell] Vought has already has written what he wants to shut down if he got a shutdown. Trump wanted a shutdown. Musk wanted a shutdown. Ask yourself why.
“For weeks and months, we had said a shutdown is awful. And by the way, every Democrat, no matter how they voted, wanted to make sure there was no shutdown. We thought there could be a bipartisan plan, and I talked to Hakeem regularly during this period. We didn’t think that [Mike] Johnson could get all his votes. He did. When it came to the Senate on Tuesday, our hope was that Patty Murray could negotiate with the Republican senators and get that 30 day C.R., a bipartisan plan. She couldn’t. So we were faced with two awful choices. The choice has been made, but I think the whole Democratic Party is united on what I mentioned in the earlier broadcast, showing how bad Trump is in every way. We’re organizing this week and next week in Republican districts. We’re having rallies to not give tax breaks to millionaires, and we’re succeeding. We’re succeeding, Lulu. We’re bringing his numbers down.”
Steve Dennis, a Bloomberg reporter who’s a former colleague of my husband, said on Bluesky: “Schumer tells me Republicans might try to jam Democrats again in September, but thinks Trump will be less popular then and Republican appropriators might be more willing to stand up to him. He said they refused to do so now.”
A Times article says: “Many Democratic lawmakers continued to express deep frustration at Senator Chuck Schumer on Sunday for having broken with most of his party to allow a Republican spending bill to pass, as the Democratic base increasingly demands stauncher resistance to President Trump’s far-reaching agenda.”
We can’t know whether a government shutdown or no shutdown would, in fact, be more damaging. But personally, I’m willing to give Schumer the benefit of the doubt.