Senate Democrats held firm and chose to block a Republican spending bill Tuesday evening, all but guaranteeing a government shutdown — even as President Donald Trump threatened “irreversible” layoffs if the bureaucracy is ground to a halt.
The Republican-controlled Senate put forth a stopgap spending bill called a continuing resolution to keep the government open until Thanksgiving. But Democrats voted against the continuing resolution, also called a CR, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer leading the charge to a shutdown.
Only Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Angus King (I-Maine) and John Fetterman (D-Penn). joined the Republicans. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was the only Republican to oppose it.
The vote sets up a full-blown government shutdown, the third during Trump’s two presidencies and the first since 2018-2019, from 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, October 1.
The vote came a day after a failed negotiation session on Monday.
A key sticking point this time around has been healthcare with Democrats wanting to include an extension of expanded health care subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace that expire at the end of the year. Republicans accuse Democrats of using that money to pay for healthcare that goes to undocumented immigrants.
And a resolution appeared far off as tempers flared, increasing the odds of a shutdown by the hour, and inflamed by Trump’s rhetoric about Democrats. Late Monday, Trump posted a vulgar and racist deepfake AI video of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries dressed in a Mexican serape and sombrero with big handlebar mustache as Schumer was depicted yelling obscenities and saying, “Nobody likes democrats anymore.”
“It’s only the president who can do this. We know he runs the show here,” Schumer said Tuesday morning, after a bipartisan White House meeting the day before yielded little progress.
“Republicans have until midnight tonight to get serious with us,” Schumer said. “But they’re lying because they know they’re screwed if this debate turns into one about healthcare. And guess what? That’s just what we’re doing. We are making this debate a debate on healthcare.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Republicans “are not going to be held hostage” by the Democrats’ demands. The GOP-led House was on a weeklong recess, unavailable for immediate votes even if the Senate did find bipartisan agreement.
The shutdown fight has served as a test of Schumer and Jeffries’ leadership of the Democrats, as their rank-and-file members and base voters have increasingly lost faith in their ability to stand up to Trump.
But a shutdown also comes with significant risks as Trump threatened massive reductions in the federal workforce when speaking on Tuesday morning.
“Now, with that being said, we can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for [Democrats] and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like,” Trump said late Tuesday afternoon from the White House.
Democrats have pointed to the fact that the Trump administration has significantly reduced the federal workforce already thanks to the Department of Government Efficiency, which Elon Musk ran in the first part of the year, and the work of Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.
“These workers are not bargaining chips,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who represents numerous federal employees, told The Independent. “If anything, they say that the Trump administration, Vought and the Department of Government Efficiency have cut the federal workforce to the bone, so this is an empty threat.”
It’s not entirely clear what an off-ramp would look like to end a government shutdown, as Republicans control both houses of Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home earlier this month after he passed the continuing resolution and has not brought the House back in session since then.
But Democrats are back in Washington and hope to apply maximum pressure. Still, they have yet to come up with a strategy. Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona — who on Tuesday called Trump “an idiot” — told The Independent that the off ramp would be people who benefit from the subsidies “getting to keep their health care.”
Government shutdowns rarely have the desired effect of the party standing in the way of a continuing resolution or budget deal. In 2013, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) famously shut down the government to defund the Affordable Care Act, which led to him delivering a pseudo-filibuster where he read Green Eggs & Ham by Dr. Seuss. That ultimately failed and it did not translate well when Cruz vied for the Republican nomination for president.
In 2018, Democrats failed to earn relief for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children when they shut down the government.
Then later that year, Trump refused to negotiate with Democrats, saying, “I am proud to shut down the government for border security.”
That led to a 35-day shutdown, the longest in history, which caused his support to bleed. When the government re-opened in January 2019, Trump did not receive money for his proposed border wall with Mexico.
But Democrats think they have a chance to win over the public.
Centrist Democratic pollster Blueprint put out a survey on Tuesday showing that 48 percent of voters would blame Trump and Republicans in Congress for a government shutdown. Only 33 percent of voters would blame Democrats.
The poll also showed that independents would blame the GOP by 21 points, with 50 percent of them blaming Republicans and only 35 percent blaming the Democrats.
At the same time, Senate Republicans pointed to polling from The New York Times and Siena College showing that 65 percent of respondents thought that “The Democrats should not shut down the government, even if their demands are not met.”
