THE PROBLEM FACING SENATE DEMOCRATS

The problem facing the Senate Democrats regarding the CR is actually quite complex, politically. Leigh ann Caldwell from Puck as written what I think is a good explanation and analysis of the situation, which I am posting here for your information:

In short, members are confused about how to vote, and craving guidance. So far, they’re not getting it.

The House just gave Trump wider latitude to issue tariffs, and made it more difficult for Congress to stop him. Recall that the Constitution says—and at least some Republicans still believe—that imposing tariffs is Congress’s job.

Trump, and presidents before him, have used national emergency declarations to expand their powers, with sometimes flimsy pretexts. Most recently, Trump has cited border crossings and fentanyl trafficking as a justification for his multifront trade war. In voting to fund the government yesterday, the House changed its rules so that they can’t consider legislation to end those national emergencies for the rest of the year.

The move was an extreme one, though neither unexpected nor unprecedented. Republicans’ grasp on the House is narrow, and it’s possible that a member of their party (ahem, Rep. Thomas Massie, perhaps) could join Democrats to try to wrest some control back from the president. G.O.P. members get quite defensive when asked about this latest delegation of their powers, and correctly point out that Democrats passed similar legislation in the past to prevent Republicans from forcing President Joe Biden to end the national Covid emergency. Nevertheless, Trump is managing to get even more power.

Chuck Schumer, the typically jovial Senate Democratic leader, has always prided himself on his vintage flip phone and preternatural ability to remember colleagues’ numbers. Lately, however, Schumer hasn’t been rolling calls with the urgency that his caucus has come to expect. Indeed, as Senate Democrats stare down the barrel of their first consequential vote, I’m told Schumer is as torn and demoralized as the rest of his party.

Democrats, of course, have vanishingly little power in Washington these days. One of their fleetingly few points of leverage is the upcoming Senate vote on the Republican bill to fund the government, which passed the House on Tuesday despite near-unified opposition from their party brethren. Its fate now falls to Senate Democrats, at least eight of whom would need to provide the votes to overcome a filibuster. Based on my conversations on the Hill this week, it’s clear that many of them fear being held responsible for a potential government shutdown. At the same time, however, they’re feeling immense pressure from their angry-as-hell constituents to do something about Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s wrecking-ball-style demolition of the federal government, and about looming Republican budget cuts that could impact essential programs like Social Security and Medicaid—Trump’s insistence to the contrary notwithstanding.

In short, it’s the kind of moment that party leaders are made for. Particularly someone like Schumer, who boasts of being in constant contact with his members, weighing their concerns and moods, helping craft strategy—even if members and staff sometimes complain that he’s afraid to play hardball and often defaults to telling members what they want to hear. But these days he doesn’t seem to be telling members much of anything, other than to keep their powder dry and their mouths shut as reporters probe his proclamation that his caucus is unified. (It’s not.)

Ahead of a two-hour, closed-door caucus meeting on Tuesday, members expected to get some answers about how they should vote, and how they should message their votes. Instead, I’m told, they got a grievance-filled brainstorming session in which Schumer did a lot of… listening. The meeting ended without a unified message or plan. “Complete lack of leadership,” one Democratic aide said. “There’s no sense of direction.”

Schumer’s strategy ahead of the House vote seemed to be to pray that Speaker Mike Johnson couldn’t coalesce his usually divisive Republican conference to pass a government spending bill. When asked what he was telling his members at his weekly news conference on Tuesday—by which point much of the reporting had made clear that the House would pass the bill—Schumer spent barely five seconds saying he’d “wait and see what the House does,” before moving on quickly. He apparently didn’t want to believe that the House could fall in line, not because of a Johnson masterstroke, but because of G.O.P. fealty to Trump. Now, funding the government is the Senate’s problem.

Senate Democrats have already lost the messaging war. Republicans have spent days framing a potential shutdown as a “Schumer shutdown,” while Schumer has avoided talking about it. Certainly, the issue is hard; the upcoming funding vote could be the most torturous that any Senate Democrat has taken. “We’re choosing between awful and terrible,” Senator Raphael Warnock told me, describing the impossible choice between capitulating to Trump and Musk’s cuts, or withholding their votes and likely triggering a government shutdown that would create even more uncertainty for government workers and the country at a time when the White House is not afraid to operate outside the bounds of the law.

The shutdown perils for Dems are substantial, and may ultimately play into Trump and Musk’s hands anyway. Politically, Democrats fear they’ll be blamed, even though Republicans control the government. They’re worried, too, about how they’d get the government back open: Republicans could force them to vote on turning the lights back on one agency at a time—making them decide whether to fund the Federal Aviation Administration, say, without receiving any concessions from Trump. Plus, a shutdown could wreak more havoc on the federal workforce, especially since it would fall to the Office of Management and Budget under Russell Vought—who has long dreamed of eliminating large swaths of the government—to determine which employees are “essential.” What if Musk decides to fire all government employees deemed “nonessential” and those government workers never get their job back? Wired reported this week that Musk wants a shutdown to more easily fire government employees. Those are the questions that Democrats, and Schumer, are grappling with.

If they vote for Republicans’ funding bill, Democrats are well aware they’ll be basically offering up a “slush fund” to Trump with few guardrails on how he can spend the money. They worry that if they don’t take a stand now, then Republicans will continue to roll them at every turn. Senate Democrats are also under pressure from their House counterparts after Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries managed to keep his caucus united in opposition to the bill in the House. “If not now, when? If not us, then who?” California Rep. Scott Peters said in a statement.

Schumer insists his caucus is unified, too, at least on a short-term funding alternative. During another day of closed-door discussions, he told Senate Democrats that the eight Democratic votes necessary to fund the government aren’t there, and he made the same pronouncement on the floor. But based on my discussions with Democrats, they aren’t unified on what to do about the vote they actually face. In fact, they’re not unified in their predictions of how many of them will vote for the funding bill—some think there are more than eight “yea” votes to fund the government in their midst. Schumer could just be trying to instill fear in Republicans, who are also a bit nervous about how this will all play out, but if there’s a bigger strategy here, it’s a headscratcher.

One Democratic strategist posited to me last week that Senate Democrats would thread the needle, providing the members needed to get past the 60-vote threshold in the procedural votes before voting against actual passage of the bill, which requires only a simple majority—an old-school tactic that lets members claim not to have obstructed process even as they opposed the underlying legislation. But as the public, especially the activated base, understands Senate procedure more than most, it’s a hard needle to thread.

Schumer’s performance on funding is giving Democrats the worst of all governing worlds: They have no power, and, apparently, no leadership either.

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