A March 14 government funding deadline is bearing down on Congress. Democrats, in the minority in both chambers, still retain the possibility of exacting concessions from Republicans.
The question is, will they use their leverage or play “adults in the room” once more?
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Thursday called out his Republican rivals — again — for supposedly walking away from talks with Democrats in both chambers and the Senate GOP.
“At this moment, there is no discussion because the Speaker of the House has apparently ordered House Republican appropriators to walk away from the negotiating table,” said the Democratic leader. ”They are marching America toward a reckless Republican shutdown.”
According to both parties, at issue is the ongoing efforts by DOGE, Elon Musk’s White House advisory council which has gone on a tear across the federal government aimed at shuttering whole agencies and freezing government spending.
Democrats fear more of the widespread slash-and-burn tactics from DOGE in the days ahead. The upcoming spending bill (or bills) needed to get the US government through the rest of the fiscal year is the party’s only opportunity to try and halt the DOGE agenda.
This is because Republicans are content to pass much of the MAGA 2.0 agenda through executive action and the budget reconciliation process — which, thanks to filibuster ineligibility, is safe from Democratic delay tactics.
Among Democratic leadership, there’s rarely been a time of more widespread support for playing hardball.
“I never support a shutdown, but I can see where it could happen in this situation. It’s an extreme situation,” Senator Dick Durbin told The Hill earlier this week.
Jeffries, in a “Dear Colleague” letter, told his party to prepare to hold Republicans accountable around the March 14 funding deadline. His goal appears to be stopping any further efforts by DOGE to freeze spending already approved by Congress.
“[A]ny effort to steal taxpayer money from the American people … must be choked off in the upcoming government funding bill,” wrote Jeffries in the letter last week.
But at the same time, he and others seem eager to shift the blame for the optics of weakness and mediocrity that seemed to envelop congressional Democrats in the wake of Kamala Harris’s defeat and the strengthening of GOP control over the Legislative Branch. And Jeffries, in particular, is said to be chafing under the pressure.
Several members partook in an airing of grievances against unhappy supporters, including major activist groups, for what they seem to view as unfair pressure on the Democratic caucuses to halt Trump’s agenda wherever possible. The venue was unsurprising: Axios, one of a handful of center-left publications that cater largely to Hill insiders.
“It’s been a constant theme of us saying, ‘Please call the Republicans,'” said one Virginia Democrat, Don Beyer, in the piece where members trashed groups like MoveOn and Indivisible for urging Democrats to call their congress members.
One unnamed “senior” House Democrat described Jeffries in the same piece as “very frustrated” with the party’s voting base. The House Democratic leader disputed that characterization.
There’s a broader theme here: for months, Democrats have been under siege from their grassroots base. Jeffries’s plan to use his leverage around the March 14 funding deadline, paired with the rallies congressional Democrats have taken to hosting outside federal agencies like the Department of Education, is aimed at calming down the Democratic base, among which House and Senate Democrats are more unpopular than ever.
A large part of that unpopularity stems from anger over the failure of more Democrats to demand Joe Biden drop out of the presidential race earlier. The defense of Biden, long past the point when it was clear his age was a major factor of concern for voters, turned into a perceived air of self-interest which has hardly dissipated since the election.
In the months since Harris’s defeat, the party has seemed rudderless and unable to formulate organized resistance to the GOP. It suffered numerous defections with the passage of the Laken Riley Act in January. Rising stars like Reps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett were passed over (read: snubbed) for key positions in the current Congress as Democrats seem to cling to seniority over meritocracy.
Jeffries is under the gun to score a real win for his base in the next month. If he doesn’t, that pressure that Democrats are so averse to feeling is only going to grow more intense.
