Schumer’s decision to cave has enraged House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) and other members of House Democratic leadership.
Two Democratic caucus senators joined 52 Senate Republicans in passing Speaker Mike Johnson’s continuing resolution to fund the government through September, helping the GOP avert a shutdown. The move is a stunning rebuke of House Democrats’ united opposition to the legislation earlier this week. The stopgap funding bill will now head to President Donald Trump’s desk hours before funding was set to elapse at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.
The past few days have been a whirlwind for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.). Facing immense pressure from his own party to push back against the Trump agenda, Schumer spent the better part of this week lambasting the legislation as a GOP power grab drafted without bipartisan input, urging his GOP colleagues to consider a 30-day continuing resolution instead.
Then, he changed course. One day after telling Republicans they did not have enough Senate Democratic votes to clear the chamber’s 60-vote filibuster, Schumer backed the bill Thursday evening — surprising many of his own colleagues on Capitol Hill and sending progressives into a tailspin. “As bad as the C.R. is,” the New York Democrat said on Friday, “I believe that allowing President Trump to take more power is a far worse option.”
Schumer has defended his decision by arguing that a shutdown is a political loser for Democrats that would further embolden the Elon Musk–run Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and empower the administration to pick and choose which federal agency services are nonessential. “There is no off-ramp,” for a shutdown, Schumer told the New York Times on Friday. “The off-ramp is in the hands of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and DOGE. We could be in a shutdown for six months or nine months.”
House Democrats are infuriated by Schumer’s reversal, especially since he and other Senate Democrats helped Republicans keep the government running without extracting any meaningful concessions in return. Schumer’s decision to cave so enraged House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) and other members of House Democratic leadership that they returned from their annual caucus retreat in Leesburg, Va., to hold a news conference inside the U.S. Capitol opposing the bill.
Asked by a reporter ahead of the Senate cloture vote whether it’s time for new Senate Democratic leadership, Jeffries said: “Next question.”
Tensions ran high in the lead-up to Friday afternoon’s cloture vote, with only a handful of Senate Democrats telegraphing their yes votes to reporters before the final tally became public. Ten members of Schumer’s party ultimately voted yes, including Senator Angus King, an Independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats. Further demonstrating the intra-party tensions, two members of Schumer’s leadership team — Senators Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Cory Booker (D., N.J.) — joined the majority of Democrats in voting no.
King and Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.) were the only two members of the Democratic caucus to vote for the C.R. Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) was the lone Republican to vote against the measure.
More than anything, the political optics of this week’s shutdown negotiations suggest congressional Democratic leaders are still divided in strategy in the wake of their brutal 2024 election loss.
“I think there is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) told reporters Thursday evening in Leesburg. House Democrats who voted against the bill earlier this week are so angry with Senate Democratic leadership’s about-face that they already privately encouraging the young progressive to challenge Schumer in a primary, CNN reported.
Like her progressive colleagues, Ocasio-Cortez has been one of the most vocal opponents of the GOP’s stopgap funding measure, telling National Review in mid-February that there existed “common ground” among Democrats around the “necessity to refuse handing over the keys” to a GOP that is dismantling the federal bureaucracy at breakneck speed.
Even former Speaker Nancy Pelosi sharply criticized Schumer’s move. “This false choice that some are buying instead of fighting is unacceptable,” Pelosi said in a statement criticizing his about-face. “I salute Leader Hakeem Jeffries for his courageous rejection of this false choice, and I am proud of my colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus for their overwhelming vote against this bill.”
Democratic lawmakers have spent recent weeks characterizing government funding negotiations as their sole area of leverage in Republican-controlled Washington, where Democratic votes are often required to advance government funding bills given the GOP’s razor-thin majority in the House.
The problem for congressional Democrats is that this bargaining power all but evaporated earlier this week, when House Republicans muscled the legislation across the finish line in a party-line vote without significant Democratic support. Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) was the lone GOP no vote, and Representative Jared Golden (D., Maine) was the lone Democratic yes vote.)
As Fetterman put it to reporters on Thursday: “The GOP delivered and that effectively iced us out.”