Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer quelled a push from Democratic senators to oppose a stopgap spending bill when he announced he would support the bill passed by Republicans and avert a government shutdown.
Schumer explained his decision to reporters on Thursday evening, saying he believed that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who leads the Department of Government Efficiency, would use a shutdown to slash government spending even further.
“I told my caucus this, there’s no off-ramp, the total off ramp of a shutdown,” he told The Independent during a press conference. “How you stop the shutdown is totally determined by the Republican House and Senate, and that is totally determined because they’ve shown complete blind obeisance by Trump, DOGE, et cetera. they could keep us in a shutdown for months and months and months.”
The move by Schumer killed the momentum to kill the bill that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed on Tuesday on an almost party-line vote. That signaled a change from Wednesday, when Democrats seemed willing to go along and vote for the bill to avert a shutdown.
Earlier in the day, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona admitted he did not like the bill passed by Republicans.
“It was just handed to us, just by House Republicans, no input from Democrats,” he told The Independent, but said he had not yet made a decision about it.
By the afternoon, Kelly came out in opposition.
“Republicans need to work with us on a real CR, a bipartisan agreement like this is always done,” Kelly told The Independent.
Kelly’s fellow Arizonan, freshman Sen. Ruben Gallego, said he would have a simple message for voters.
“Donald Trump and the Republicans shut down the government,” he told The Independent.
Virginia’s Mark Warner, who represents a state with plenty of federal workers who have been hit by the cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, said voters understood the need to oppose the bill.
“These are federal workers who’ve got a lot of stake; they want me to be a ‘no,’” he told The Independent.
Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado dodged questions, but later in the day came out against the continuing resolution.
Historically, the party that opposes spending bills is blamed for shutting down the government.
But Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said the blame would fall squarely on the Republicans and Trump.
“I think the message is that the republicans gave us two extremely unpopular choices, spurned a bipartisan return to regular order all to give more power to President Trump and continue the madness that they could have ended,” he told The Independent.
A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday showed that if a shutdown happened, 32 percent of voters said they would blame congressional Democrats, but 31 percent said they would blame congressional Republicans, and 22 percent said they would blame Trump the most.
Until Schumer’s announcement, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania had been the main supporter of the continuing resolution.
When asked if he had read the text of the 99-page continuing resolution, Fetterman dodged.
“I’m never gonna vote to shut the government down,” he told The Independent. “There’s no news notes on that. They invented this thing called Google or the internet, and you could confirm that.”
