Politics
/
March 14, 2025
The Senate minority chief seems to assume the way in which to withstand the Trump administration is by voting for the GOP’s spending invoice.
Advert Coverage
Senate majority chief Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks to a crowd gathered in entrance of the US Treasury Division in protest of Elon Musk and the Division of Authorities Effectivity on February 4, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Anna Rose Layden / Getty Photos)
At one of many first wildcat demonstrations exterior a authorities company protesting the Trump-Musk assault on the general public sector, Senate minority chief Chuck Schumer led a clumsy chant. “We are going to win!” he shouted from behind his studying glasses, as members of the group countered with chants of “How?” and “What’s the plan?”
Schumer’s efficiency was promptly memeified, serving as an all-too-vivid reminder that the Democratic Celebration’s congressional management was assembly an historic governance disaster by working on autopilot. And now, after the New York senator wasted the get together’s essential level of leverage within the combat over funding the federal government, the demonstrators demanding a plan have their reply: Democratic leaders by no means had one, aside from serving up the meekest symbolic feint of resistance earlier than caving in to Republican strain. After briefly indicating that the Democratic Senate caucus wouldn’t assist the Home’s persevering with decision on authorities spending, Schumer put ahead a professional forma funding extension to proceed spending talks in Congress for an additional month. He then mustered a corps of fellow leaders and senators from secure deep-blue states to fall into line with a Republican cloture vote, clearing the way in which for the decision’s simple passage; now that the cloture movement carried with the requisite eight Democratic votes, the invoice’s passage is a fiat accompli. (Schumer additionally acquired an modification to revive $1 billion in funding for the Washington, DC, authorities that had been minimize from the Home-passed decision, which the Home must vote on individually when members return from recess subsequent week; that’s a longshot proposition for a GOP majority working largely on a calculus of political payback.)
Schumer made the case for his tactical retreat by citing precedents. “There aren’t any winners in a authorities shutdown,” he wrote in a New York Occasions op-ed. He then spelled out his reasoning:
As dangerous as passing the persevering with decision could be, I imagine a authorities shutdown is way worse. First, a shutdown would give Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk permission to destroy very important authorities providers at a considerably quicker fee than they’ll proper now. Underneath a shutdown, the Trump administration would have wide-ranging authority to deem entire companies, applications and personnel nonessential, furloughing employees members with no promise they’d ever be rehired.
Underneath something resembling a standard political order, this could be a compelling argument. However Schumer’s capitulation, like his clueless chant, fails totally to reckon with how profoundly the second Trump administration has already undermined and fatally weakened that order. Giving Trump and Musk “permission” to do something is just about an empty conceit: The DOGE-bro administration has already functionally shuttered whole companies, like USAID and CFPB, slashed company funding, and fired hundreds upon hundreds of federal employees on the premise of nothing greater than misinterpret spreadsheets and dipshit AI directives. It’s essential to know that in these circumstances, the usual logic of shutdown posturing on Capitol Hill has been inverted: Because the Trump White Home carries out an unlicensed authorities shutdown, passively approving the GOP’s spending blueprint does nothing greater than abet it—needlessly sacrificing the Democrats’ meager retailer of political capital within the course of.
This carnage is overtly unlawful and unconstitutional, so arguing {that a} shutdown would quantity to Congress endorsing the DOGE killing spree is a bit like calling the Skynet apocalypse within the Terminator franchise a coding error: technically true maybe, however howlingly irrelevant. The purpose is to not procedurally litigate a frontal assault on Congress’s spending authority—it must be, reasonably, to combat and defeat it, with no matter instruments are at hand.
How does Schumer suggest to try this? Right here’s his crowning argument:
A shutdown could be the very best distraction Donald Trump may ask for from his terrible agenda.
Proper now, Mr. Trump owns the chaos within the authorities. He owns the chaos within the inventory market. He owns the harm taking place to our financial system. The inventory market is falling, and shopper confidence is plummeting.
In a shutdown, we’d be busy preventing with Republicans over which companies to reopen and which to maintain closed as a substitute of debating the harm Mr. Trump’s agenda is inflicting.
Present Difficulty
Acquired that? The disaster that Schumer earlier cites as a grave hurt to atypical People and authorities employees seems right here as a sideshow, which MAGA world can solely exploit to its benefit. Much better to clear Congress’s schedule for “debating the harm” wrought by Trump and Musk et al. In fact, “debating the harm” has been all that Democratic leaders have been doing over the last decade of Trump’s ascendance. The lengthy regress of proceedings to ascertain notional accountability over MAGA’s numerous legal and unconstitutional trespasses has ranged from the Mueller investigation to the 2 impeachments over Trump’s first time period to Merrick Garland’s dilatory and politically doomed probes of the January 6 rebel to the Mar-a-Lago paperwork case. As that dreary roll name makes painfully clear, it’s not the case that Democratic leaders are using their powers to push their opponents right into a place of better political accountability; reasonably, they’re counting on procedural and authorized maneuvers to shun the work of politics.
The identical holds for Schumer’s incoherent thought experiment. Forcing a political confrontation over the Trump White Home’s spending priorities isn’t a “distraction” from severe politics—it goes to the center of the current political disaster. All it’s a must to do to verify that is to seek the advice of Republicans themselves. Even earlier than the Home GOP convention permitted it, Vice President JD Vance introduced that the measure was drafted intentionally to allow the White Home to proceed clawing again key expenditures—or, as he put it in an ill-informed faux-constitutional clarification to Home members, in order that Trump can “guarantee allocations from Congress are usually not spent on issues that hurt the taxpayer.” Fox Information is reporting that the administration is already planning to advance additional cuts inside the persevering with decision, following the lead of Workplace of Administration and Funds Director Russell Vought, who contends that the 1974 Impoundment Management act, which prohibits the manager department from withholding or redirecting congressionally appropriated funds, is unconstitutional.
That is all to say nothing of the damaging provisions already within the decision. That features not merely the $1 billion in withheld funding to the District of Columbia—a typical merchandise in previous CRs—which is able to go to grievous financial hurt on a area that’s already reeling from the bloody cuts to the federal workforce. The decision can even minimize greater than $1 billion in Division of Protection well being analysis and $250 million extra from the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, which has already suffered excessive cutbacks on DOGE’s doddering watch. For Schumer to think about such devastating and unwarranted cuts a “distraction” is, to place issues charitably, extremely callous and myopic. To place issues much less charitably, it quantities to saying,, “I’m simply not that concerned about doing my job.”
This latter view is borne out by the broader sweep of Democratic rhetoric. Simply months in the past, on the top of the 2024 presidential marketing campaign, Democrats ran aggressively towards the provisions of the Heritage Basis’s Mission 2025—and rightly so, because it has change into the blueprint for the Trump-Musk killing spree in Washington. And far of the wrecking job flows straight from lead strategist Russell Vought’s demented imaginative and prescient in that doc of an unshackled unitary govt, impounding congressional funds at will whereas casually disregarding Congress as a co-equal department of presidency. If Democrats have been remotely severe in confronting this central menace, they need to have plotted out a technique to face down the current Vought-engineered putsch on Congress’s independence. Now, even Democratic moderates are bitterly denouncing Schumer’s capitulation; within the run-up to the cloture combat, one unnamed Home “centrist” informed CNN that “if Chuck Schumer can’t get us a greater vote, he ought to resign.” Different conventional left-baiting Democrats like Neera Tanden of the Heart for American Progress and former DNC chair Jaime Harrison have additionally excoriated Schumer, and former Home speaker Nancy Pelosi has referred to as for the Senate to vote down the persevering with decision. Even By no means Trump Republicans like Adam Kinzinger and Jennifer Rubin have decried Schumer’s preemptive climb down.
However Schumer’s conduct has been in step with the general flat-footed character of the Democratic response to the wild-swinging Trump spending agenda. As an alternative of aggressively concentrating on the GOP’s proposals, Democratic leaders have flailed and dithered, with the battle unfolding simply because the GOP engineered it. As NBC Hill correspondent Sahil Kapur wrote on X:
The Democrat’s CR technique (for those who may even name it that) was a discombobulated mess. Clinging to FY25 (appropriations) deal after Trump/Johnson killed it. Assuming Johnson can’t move a CR. Missing a counteroffer after he does. Threatening to filibuster then caring in 24 hrs empty-handed.
Small marvel that, whilst Schumer was arranging his short-lived Kabuki dissent from the GOP’s spending plan, Republicans felt supremely assured they’d prevail—and publicly stated as a lot. “They’re 100% going to swallow it,” one White Home official informed Politico reporter Rachel Bade. “They’re completely screwed.”
This, too, is a universe faraway from the normal White Home playbook in a shutdown combat; in most high-stakes price range battles, there’s at the very least a floor effort to endorse a workable compromise or two. That the Trump crew feels liberated from such constraints isn’t only a signal of their authoritarian boorishness (although it’s, in fact, additionally that); it’s a recognition that they’ll do as they please as long as the opposition get together is run by individuals who hate politics. In different phrases, the Democrats aren’t completely screwed by the GOP, however by themselves. And no, they—and we—received’t win, as long as they keep the identical brain-dead course.
Donald Trump’s merciless and chaotic second time period is simply getting began. In his first month again in workplace, Trump and his lackey Elon Musk (or is it the opposite approach round?) have confirmed that nothing is secure from sacrifice on the altar of unchecked energy and riches.
Solely sturdy impartial journalism can minimize via the noise and provide clear-eyed reporting and evaluation based mostly on precept and conscience. That’s what The Nation has accomplished for 160 years and that’s what we’re doing now.
Our impartial journalism doesn’t permit injustice to go unnoticed or unchallenged—nor will we abandon hope for a greater world. Our writers, editors, and fact-checkers are working relentlessly to maintain you knowledgeable and empowered when a lot of the media fails to take action out of credulity, concern, or fealty.
The Nation has seen unprecedented instances earlier than. We draw power and steerage from our historical past of principled progressive journalism in instances of disaster, and we’re dedicated to persevering with this legacy right now.
We’re aiming to boost $25,000 throughout our Spring Fundraising Marketing campaign to make sure that we now have the sources to show the oligarchs and profiteers trying to loot our republic. Stand for daring impartial journalism and donate to assist The Nation right now.
Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Writer, The Nation
Chris Lehmann
Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was previously editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the creator, most not too long ago, of The Cash Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville Home, 2016).
Extra from The Nation
The Marvelous Mr. Measles.
Thirty years after she got here to the US, the Minnesota consultant retains the religion in an America that can finally reject the divisive politics of Trump and his minions.
John Nichols
Take a look at all installments within the OppArt collection.
Ward Sutton
It’s going to take a brand new motion of accountable readers and benefactors to guard impartial media.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Natasha Lennard argues that it’s dangerous to acquiesce to the state’s determinations of violence, whereas David Cortright writes that violent acts stop mass resistance actions.
The Debate
/
Natasha Lennard and David Cortright
Present and former workers on the company spoke with The Nation in regards to the chaos as 1,300 individuals have been laid off on Tuesday. “The ramifications of this will likely be monumental.”
StudentNation
/
Owen Dahlkamp
