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Senate Democrats are making a calculated gamble that cutting bipartisan spending deals this summer could save them from another politically painful shutdown fight this fall.
Since their March crackup over whether to accept Republicans’ government funding bill, Democrats have gotten repeatedly trampled by their opponents’ partisan power plays on tax cuts, spending cuts, and rolling back Biden-era regulations.
Even the usual bipartisan exercise of raising the debt ceiling got thrown into President Donald Trump’s party-line megabill, further degrading Democratic leverage.
Democrats still wield the legislative filibuster over government funding bills, but shutdown fights aren’t exactly in their DNA. So they are hoping that bipartisan spending deals will inoculate them from September hardball and avoid the kind of take-it-or-leave-it jam they experienced in March.
“My orientation now is to pass as many bipartisan bills as we can, so we don’t have to face an all-or-nothing bill in September,” Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, told Semafor.
He said he hopes to get GOP agreements that key pieces of any spending deal aren’t dismantled via the party-line rescissions process Republicans used just last week: “I’ll be looking for some assurance that on these bipartisan bills, they mean it. They can’t go back on it.”
Relegated to the minority and with little sway over the congressional agenda, Democrats are betting that the bipartisan route is the least terrible of several bad options ahead of them. The House GOP proved it can unilaterally fund the government without Democratic votes earlier this year, lessening the party’s leverage on that side of the Capitol.
After a lengthy caucus meeting on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer led most of his party to advance a Veterans Affairs and Military Construction spending bill, probably the least controversial of the annual funding measures. His only alternative was to filibuster the bills and prepare for a shutdown fight.
“We are going to think about ways in which we can rebuild trust after rescissions. And you know, from my perspective, I’d like to make a bipartisan appropriations process work again,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., a member of the Appropriations Committee, told Semafor.
Writing “bills that both parties can stand behind would make it actually harder for a partisan CR to be jammed through,” she added.
Still, it’s a decision that comes with some controversy. Schumer faced some of his harshest intraparty criticism earlier this year, after he and nine other Senate Democrats allowed a six-month spending bill to go through the Senate and become law.
Republicans just unilaterally cut $9 billion in congressionally-approved spending through rescissions, adding further drama to what’s already a hard enough deadline to meet.
“They’ve shown no respect for the norms or rules. It’s just partisan hardball and acting as Trump’s puppet,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told Semafor.
“If Trump boasts about doing partisan, one-sided triumphs — as disastrous as they are for the country — there’s little room for bipartisan compromise,” he added. “But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try if it’s in the best interest of the country.”
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Schumer is maneuvering his party to avoid another internal firefight, hosting a lengthy Democratic caucus meeting on Tuesday and then linking up with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., on Tuesday afternoon — an important development after the two leaders’ coordination faltered badly this spring.
“Democrats want a bipartisan deal. We’re working together to get one. But the bottom line is, Republicans are making it much harder,” Schumer said.
“You can’t say you want a bipartisan process, which [Majority Leader John Thune] said yesterday, and at the same time, put rescissions on the floor, which is the antithesis of bipartisanship.”
Still, it’s conventional wisdom now that the annual appropriations process is broken. The last time Congress passed all of the 12 spending bills on time was 1996. The Senate is just bringing its first spending bill to the floor now, in July.
Thune, R-S.D., wants to add a couple of other less controversial appropriations bills to the package. The hope is that sets the stage for a more collegial September.
There’s a good chance it doesn’t end up working out and Congress gets left with a dreaded continuing resolution extending current spending levels — and avoiding a shutdown.
Most Democrats don’t even want to entertain that now. But not all of them are reluctant.
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., told Semafor his position hasn’t changed: “I’ll never vote for something that will shut the government down.” And he said the 10 Democrats who voted to avoid a shutdown in March should feel “vindicated.”
“Trump could literally just mass fire everyone during a shutdown now. And the Supreme Court would probably back much of that,” Fetterman said. “Don’t ever shut the government down. It was wrong when they were threatening and trying to do that. And it’s wrong for our party as well.”
Room for Disagreement
Though Republicans will need probably at least eight Democratic votes to pass anything in the Senate to fund the government, some Democrats say ultimately it’s the GOP’s responsibility to figure things out.
“Republicans are in charge of everything,” said Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M. “They bear the responsibility and the burden.”
Burgess’s view
It could be an ugly September. And it’s very possible Democrats must undergo the same wrenching internal debate over whether to pick a shutdown fight that they experienced earlier this year.
I’m not confident that Schumer would go for a partisan Republican CR at this point — which is why Democrats are trying to play ball on the appropriations bills now
All that said, a shutdown is certainly on the table this fall. Democrats are facing pressure to fight Trump, Republicans are cutting spending with the rescissions package, and somehow Congress always finds a way to screw up the regular spending bill process.
Maybe things turn out differently this time, but it’s logical to be skeptical.
