The Senate minority leader appears to think the way to resist the Trump administration is by voting for the GOP’s spending bill.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks to a crowd gathered in front of the US Treasury Department in protest of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency on February 4, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Anna Rose Layden / Getty Images)
At one of the first wildcat demonstrations outside a government agency protesting the Trump-Musk assault on the public sector, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer led an awkward chant. “We will win!” he shouted from behind his reading glasses, as members of the crowd countered with chants of “How?” and “What’s the plan?”
Schumer’s performance was promptly memeified, serving as an all-too-vivid reminder that the Democratic Party’s congressional leadership was meeting an historic governance crisis by running on autopilot. And now, after the New York senator wasted the party’s critical point of leverage in the fight over funding the government, the demonstrators demanding a plan have their answer: Democratic leaders never had one, apart from serving up the meekest symbolic feint of resistance before caving in to Republican pressure. After briefly indicating that the Democratic Senate caucus would not support the House’s continuing resolution on government spending, Schumer put forward a pro forma funding extension to continue spending talks in Congress for another month. He then mustered a corps of fellow leaders and senators from safe deep-blue states to fall into line with a Republican cloture vote, clearing the way for the resolution’s easy passage; now that the cloture motion carried with the requisite eight Democratic votes, the bill’s passage is a fiat accompli. (Schumer also got an amendment to restore $1 billion in funding for the Washington, DC, government that had been cut from the House-passed resolution, which the House will have to vote on separately when members return from recess next week; that’s a longshot proposition for a GOP majority operating largely on a calculus of political payback.)
Schumer made the case for his tactical retreat by citing precedents. “There are no winners in a government shutdown,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. He then spelled out his reasoning:
As bad as passing the continuing resolution would be, I believe a government shutdown is far worse. First, a shutdown would give Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk permission to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now. Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have wide-ranging authority to deem whole agencies, programs and personnel nonessential, furloughing staff members with no promise they would ever be rehired.
Under anything resembling a normal political order, this would be a compelling argument. But Schumer’s capitulation, like his clueless chant, fails utterly to reckon with how profoundly the second Trump administration has already undermined and fatally weakened that order. Giving Trump and Musk “permission” to do anything is pretty much an empty conceit: The DOGE-bro administration has already functionally shuttered entire agencies, like USAID and CFPB, slashed agency funding, and fired thousands upon thousands of federal workers on the basis of nothing more than misread spreadsheets and dipshit AI directives. It’s crucial to understand that in these conditions, the standard logic of shutdown posturing on Capitol Hill has been inverted: As the Trump White House carries out an unlicensed government shutdown, passively approving the GOP’s spending blueprint does nothing more than abet it—needlessly sacrificing the Democrats’ meager store of political capital in the process.
This carnage is brazenly illegal and unconstitutional, so arguing that a shutdown would amount to Congress endorsing the DOGE killing spree is a bit like calling the Skynet apocalypse in the Terminator franchise a coding error: technically true perhaps, but howlingly irrelevant. The point is not to procedurally litigate a frontal assault on Congress’s spending authority—it should be, rather, to fight and defeat it, with whatever tools are at hand.
How does Schumer propose to do that? Here’s his crowning argument:
A shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda.
Right now, Mr. Trump owns the chaos in the government. He owns the chaos in the stock market. He owns the damage happening to our economy. The stock market is falling, and consumer confidence is plummeting.
In a shutdown, we would be busy fighting with Republicans over which agencies to reopen and which to keep closed instead of debating the damage Mr. Trump’s agenda is causing.
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Got that? The crisis that Schumer earlier cites as a grave harm to ordinary Americans and government workers appears here as a sideshow, which MAGA world can only exploit to its advantage. Far better to clear Congress’s schedule for “debating the damage” wrought by Trump and Musk et al. Of course, “debating the damage” has been all that Democratic leaders have been doing over the decade of Trump’s ascendance. The long regress of proceedings to establish notional accountability over MAGA’s countless criminal and unconstitutional trespasses has ranged from the Mueller investigation to the two impeachments over Trump’s first term to Merrick Garland’s dilatory and politically doomed probes of the January 6 insurrection to the Mar-a-Lago documents case. As that dreary roll call makes painfully clear, it’s not the case that Democratic leaders are employing their powers to push their opponents into a position of greater political accountability; rather, they are relying on procedural and legal maneuvers to shun the work of politics.
The same holds for Schumer’s incoherent thought experiment. Forcing a political confrontation over the Trump White House’s spending priorities isn’t a “distraction” from serious politics—it goes to the heart of the present political crisis. All you have to do to confirm this is to consult Republicans themselves. Even before the House GOP conference approved it, Vice President JD Vance announced that the measure was drafted deliberately to permit the White House to continue clawing back key expenditures—or, as he put it in an ill-informed faux-constitutional explanation to House members, so that Trump can “ensure allocations from Congress are not spent on things that harm the taxpayer.” Fox News is reporting that the administration is already planning to advance further cuts within the continuing resolution, following the lead of Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who contends that the 1974 Impoundment Control act, which prohibits the executive branch from withholding or redirecting congressionally appropriated funds, is unconstitutional.
This is all to say nothing of the damaging provisions already in the resolution. That includes not merely the $1 billion in withheld funding to the District of Columbia—a standard item in past CRs—which will visit grievous economic harm on a region that’s already reeling from the bloody cuts to the federal workforce. The resolution will also cut more than $1 billion in Department of Defense health research and $250 million more from the National Institutes of Health, which has already suffered extreme cutbacks on DOGE’s doddering watch. For Schumer to consider such devastating and unwarranted cuts a “distraction” is, to put things charitably, incredibly callous and myopic. To put things less charitably, it amounts to saying,, “I’m just not that interested in doing my job.”
This latter view is borne out by the wider sweep of Democratic rhetoric. Just months ago, at the height of the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats ran aggressively against the provisions of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—and rightly so, since it has become the blueprint for the Trump-Musk killing spree in Washington. And much of the wrecking job flows directly from lead strategist Russell Vought’s demented vision in that document of an unshackled unitary executive, impounding congressional funds at will while casually disregarding Congress as a co-equal branch of government. If Democrats were remotely serious in confronting this central threat, they should have plotted out a strategy to face down the present Vought-engineered putsch on Congress’s independence. Now, even Democratic moderates are bitterly denouncing Schumer’s capitulation; in the run-up to the cloture fight, one unnamed House “centrist” told CNN that “if Chuck Schumer can’t get us a better vote, he should resign.” Other traditional left-baiting Democrats like Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress and former DNC chair Jaime Harrison have also excoriated Schumer, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for the Senate to vote down the continuing resolution. Even Never Trump Republicans like Adam Kinzinger and Jennifer Rubin have decried Schumer’s preemptive climb down.
But Schumer’s conduct has been consistent with the overall flat-footed character of the Democratic response to the wild-swinging Trump spending agenda. Instead of aggressively targeting the GOP’s proposals, Democratic leaders have flailed and dithered, with the conflict unfolding just as the GOP engineered it. As NBC Hill correspondent Sahil Kapur wrote on X:
The Democrat’s CR strategy (if you can even call it that) was a discombobulated mess. Clinging to FY25 [appropriations] deal after Trump/Johnson killed it. Assuming Johnson can’t pass a CR. Lacking a counteroffer after he does. Threatening to filibuster then caring in 24 hrs empty-handed.
Small wonder that, even as Schumer was arranging his short-lived Kabuki dissent from the GOP’s spending plan, Republicans felt supremely confident they would prevail—and publicly said as much. “They’re 100 percent going to swallow it,” one White House official told Politico reporter Rachel Bade. “They’re totally screwed.”
This, too, is a universe removed from the traditional White House playbook in a shutdown fight; in most high-stakes budget battles, there’s at least a surface effort to endorse a workable compromise or two. That the Trump team feels liberated from such constraints isn’t just a sign of their authoritarian boorishness (though it is, of course, also that); it’s a recognition that they can do as they please so long as the opposition party is run by people who hate politics. In other words, the Democrats aren’t totally screwed by the GOP, but by themselves. And no, they—and we—won’t win, so long as they stay the same brain-dead course.
Donald Trump’s cruel and chaotic second term is just getting started. In his first month back in office, Trump and his lackey Elon Musk (or is it the other way around?) have proven that nothing is safe from sacrifice at the altar of unchecked power and riches.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
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