Eight Senate Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., voted with Republicans on Friday to allow a vote on the funding bill passed earlier this week by the House.
The Senate then voted 54-46 to pass the budget resolution, which gives Donald Trump and Elon Musk wide latitude to spend federal taxpayer dollars as they see fit, without oversight from Congress.
Which means, all guardrails are now off.
So, why didn’t Schumer use the leverage of cloture to force Trump and congressional Republicans to negotiate something in the way of concessions into the final spending package?
ICYMI
“They could keep us in a shutdown for months and months and months,” Schumer told reporters Thursday night.
OK.
And wouldn’t “they” have to own it, then?
“We shouldn’t be blessing the actions of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. We should be fighting against them at every opportunity,” said U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., in a video released before the vote.
Kaine, to his credit, has come around on joining the political fight against Trump, after initially playing bipartisan, voting for several controversial Trump nominees in the first weeks after the inauguration.
Kaine was a no vote on Friday, as was another former fence-sitting Democrat, Mark Warner, D-Va.
“We don’t need to turn any more power or money without any controls over to Elon Musk and Donald Trump. It’s time to stand up for the folks in Virginia who say, enough of this craziness,” Warner said in a video message released before the vote.
That was the general message and response from critics of Schumer and the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who fundamentally misread basically everything with how the budget votes were going to play out this week.
It seems that Schumer and Jeffries just assumed Republicans wouldn’t be able to get a spending bill out of the House, and that was the strategy – just let Republicans fall flat on their face.
Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson whipped House Republican votes to get a four-vote majority earlier this week, and somehow this caught Democratic leaders flat-flooted.
“We had hoped that maybe Johnson couldn’t get the votes. But when he did, it put us in a very, very tough place,” Schumer said.
That’s a pathetic cop-out, of course, and Kaine and Warner, in a joint statement released this evening, noted it as such.
“We are frustrated that this funding bill gives a blank check to Donald Trump and Elon Musk to continue attacking the federal workforce and dismantling the services Virginians rely on,” the senators said in the statement. “This bill lacks the meaningful proposals we offered as amendments to rein in and defund DOGE and protect our veterans from being indiscriminately fired – because Republicans blocked them all.
“As Donald Trump and Elon Musk continue to seek giant tax cuts for billionaires while laying off workers, slashing services, and tanking our economy, we will keep standing up for everyday Virginians, who have had enough of this chaos and lawlessness,” the senators said. “That means we are already gearing up for our next fight: forcing a Senate vote on our legislation to challenge Trump’s senseless trade war with Canada, which will only raise costs for Virginians.”
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Chris Graham
