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The Senate’s move Friday to avoid a government shutdown—essentially ceding spending power to President Donald Trump and downgrading Congress to an advisory role—was an epic climbdown that is rightfully sending the Democrats’ base into a spiral.
The rage among Democrats trained on one figure: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who signaled a day earlier that the fight was over and it was time to move on. The choice was to hold open the doors of a scaled-down government or to slam it closed on what stood before, and the outcome tells the story.
That does not mean anyone in the party was happy about how this went down.
Asked Friday if it was time for a new Leadership team for Senate Democrats, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declined to throw Schumer a life preserver. “Next question,” Jeffries said. In other spaces, there was an open talk of primarying Schumer when he is next on the ballot in 2028.
Nine Senate Democrats—and Independent Angus King of Maine who caucuses with them—joined all but one Senate Republican on Friday to sidestep a government shutdown. The stopgap spending plan gives the White House a freer hand to shutter dozens of federal functions created by Congress and eliminate thousands of jobs. Congress, at least through Sept. 30, is in effect legislating a stronger executive branch that can basically do anything with the money lawmakers release.
It was a crap ending to what’s been a crap week for Democrats, frankly. On top of all of the chaos unfurling from the Trump White House by way of new executive orders, hires, fires, and tariffs, they have also had to face this ticking clock of a government shutdown. House Republicans jammed Democrats with a party-line spending plan that is especially heinous in its cuts to the District of Columbia. Then, the House ditched town, giving the Senate zero say to tweak the spending. Then, Schumer on Wednesday asserted the framework had insufficient support to get across the finish line. And, then, a day later, he said he would support the spending structure to block a shutdown.
The whiplash from the shut-it-down to keep-it-alive posturing only fed the contempt that many Democrats were already harboring toward their current leaders.
“Whatever happens will happen,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who was a “no” vote and used the hours ahead of the votes to telegraph a dark fatalism.
That resignation has been bleeding through Washington in recent weeks. The fight among anti-Trumpers of all stripes has faded in recent days as Trump’s brazen conquest of the spending system was looking increasingly inevitable. The chest-thumping celebrations in the White House and the antics of its pet-project DOGE intersected to rile up Democrats, who have been trying to defend all corners of the federal cogs.
Ultimately, though, the Democrats in a position to thwart Trump and his GOP allies caved. Republicans have majorities in the House and Senate, plus control of the White House. But Senate rules require 60 votes to get balls rolling, and Republicans had just 52 yes votes in the Upper Chamber. That meant GOP lawmakers needed to get eight converts among Democrats.
Senate Democrats looked at the math, polling, and their own talents. They made the call that the mismatch of their desire to oppose Trump’s unilateral power grab did not match their ability to actually stop it. Poli-sci nerds will tell you that actual power lies at the point where will and capacity are synced up. Democrats had the power to shut down the government but lacked the bandwidth to sell it as the other guys’ fault, or put forth a unified plan on how to reopen the government on better terms.
The problem now lies with how Democrats deal with the Schumer sitch. They are very, very quiet at the moment, but there are the faintest of rumblings about whether Schumer gets to hold his position as Minority Leader for the balance of this term. Progressive and rank-and-file corners of the party alike were uneasy about this call, and steering this unruly ship into 2026 is a job that is not something to be taken lightly.
To be clear: Schumer is not at risk of being deposed in short order, and Democrats do not carry House Republicans’ appetite for cannibalizing their own. Schumer acts on calculations, not confidences. His decision to side with keeping the government open at the expense of legislative branch power came from a place of rationality, not rashness. But it still carried costs, and the first among them was his standing with frustrated Democrats who want the opposition party to do its job: to oppose an administration hellbent on dismantling a government it holds in sheer contempt.
Government, for the moment, survives. Democrats, for the foreseeable future, find their ability to check Trump diminished. And, until Congress reverses itself, the legislative branch takes a secondary role to the executive.
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