It Is Not Chuck Schumer's Job to Satisfy Your Emotional Needs

Forcing a shutdown would be a show of 'fighting,' but it would not advance Democratic policy interests — in fact, it would hurt them, and the public as well. Schumer is right not to do it.

Dear readers,

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has done something that has made a lot of Democratic partisans very angry: He has said that he will join a fraction of his Democratic colleagues in voting to allow the Republican-drafted, House-passed continuing resolution to come to the Senate floor, so Republicans can pass it with a simple majority vote. Democrats could, if they wished, block the CR from coming to a vote and force a government shutdown. That they are choosing not to do this is outraging many Democrats, who feel Schumer is passing up an opportunity to fight.

I have a message to those Democrats: Grow up. While a “fight” here might be emotionally satisfying for you, it would not advance Democrats’ policy agenda and would only hand Donald Trump more power in his already-ongoing project to dismantle large parts of the federal government.

Before you send me any angry emails in response to my command that you grow up, I have another instruction for you: Read to the bottom of this piece first, and tell me why I am wrong about what would happen if Schumer and Senate Democrats “stood up to Trump instead of complying in advance” or whatever. I am not interested in your arguments about what laws Congress should pass, or what Republicans ought to agree to if Democrats block the CR. I want you to explain to me what sequence of events would follow from blockage and lead to a government that operates more in line with Democrats’ values and preferences — that is, how this whole exercise would make the public any better off.

As you may have noticed, Elon Musk has already been trying to shut down the government — not through a shutdown fight of course, but by simply firing workers and closing agencies, and doing so in violation of laws Congress passed that set out how the government should spend money. That is very upsetting, but it is also an important signal that neither the Trump Administration nor Republicans in Congress would care if a shutdown made it difficult for government agencies to function. What they would care about is that a government shutdown, if Democrats forced one, would unlock more legal power for the president to decide how the government should operate. Trump could declare functions he does care about to be “essential” and keep them going, while furloughing all the employees he’d really like to fire and shutting down all the operations he’d like to permanently terminate, and he could do so with much stronger legal authority than DOGE has been using to do similar things to date. (Gabe Fleischer has a good thread walking through all of this in more operational detail.)

This is the real problem here, and Schumer is right to point it out and right to make the politically unpopular choice to let the CR pass in response to it.

Those who advocate blocking the CR are eliding a very important distinction about what power Democrats actually have. Yes, Democrats have the power to block the passage of the CR, which would fund the government through September 30. Yes, they can force a government shutdown. This does not mean that Democrats have the power to produce a better policy outcome by blocking the passage of the CR. Unless what you’re after here is really just an emotionally satisfying experience of watching Democrats “fight” the president — that is, unless politics is really just entertainment or symbolism for you — that’s what you should care about.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who now holds one of the most thankless jobs in Washington, leaves the Democratic caucus lunch at the U.S. Capitol on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

But sure, fine, let’s walk through what would happen if Schumer changes his mind, his Democratic colleagues come along with him, and the CR is blocked from coming to the Senate floor for passage. Does this create pressure on Republicans to come to the table and negotiate? What angry Democrats say they want instead is a “clean” 30-day CR, which would create time for Republicans and Democrats to have a bipartisan negotiation about how to fund the government through September. What they would ultimately like are some sort of legal strictures on the administration that would purport to rein in the DOGE project, and they’d like to unwind some of the policy changes in the Republican bill, such as a gratuitous requirement for mid-year cuts to the budget of the District of Columbia.

Those things all sound nice. But Republicans are not going to agree to them because they won’t be especially bothered by a government shutdown, and they will know that Democrats care more about ending it than they do.

Usually, a party might want to end a shutdown for a few reasons. One is that the shutdown is hampering the government’s ability to do things they care about. Another is that they care that shutdown might be unpopular and politically costly. Again: Neither of these concerns applies to Republicans today. Trump is currently in the process of starting pointless trade wars that stand to tank both the economy and his approval ratings, and seems unfazed by that prospect — why would he be worried that Republicans have lost a “blame” game about a shutdown that would be far in the rearview mirror by the next federal election?

On the other hand, once a shutdown started, Democrats would face immediate pain points that would make them very badly want the government back open. Trump would be able to pick and choose operational closures in line with his policy preferences, ceasing all sorts of government operations Democrats care about. In order to make those cessations clearly illegal, Democrats will need a law reopening the government, because otherwise the president can (correctly) point out that the things Democrats want done aren’t even funded by law. And they will need Republican votes to reopen the government.

So what would happen is that Republicans would sit and watch Democrats squirm until Democrats caved and allow the Republican-initiated CR — which mostly does prescribe continued funding for the programs Democrats care about — to pass. If Democrats don’t let the Republican CR pass now, the only available endgame is that they will let it pass in a week or two or three or six, and in the meantime, Trump will have more power to do more damage to the operations of the federal government. “Fighting” will only make the situation worse.

The arguments otherwise are deeply unconvincing. Consider, for example, Nancy Pelosi’s statement blasting Schumer’s decision. She says the idea that Democrats must choose between a shutdown and letting the Republican CR pass is a “false choice.” She says Democrats “must have a better choice: a four-week funding extension to keep government open and negotiate a bipartisan agreement.” But Democrats do not have that choice! If Democrats block the CR, Republicans won’t agree to pass Democrats’ four-week stopgap.¹ They will allow the government to shut down, and so the choice is not false at all. She then adds a gratuitous appeal to gender, saying Democrats must “listen to the women”: Patty Murray and Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrats on the Senate and House Appropriations Committees, respectively, share Pelosi’s position, and I guess their gender is supposed to be important in deciding who is right. Democratic politicians make these arguments ad demographicum when they don’t have a good substantive argument. And besides, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is a woman, too. Why shouldn’t Democrats instead listen to her when she literally shouts about why allowing a shutdown this time would be an especially bad idea?

I understand why this situation is so dispiriting, and I also get why it is disorienting for Democratic voters and even some Democratic lawmakers, who are used to having more leverage in fights over government funding than they have right now. It used to be the case that Republicans needed to negotiate with Democrats to keep the government open. But some facts on the ground have changed. First, Republicans won the presidency. A shutdown is more attractive to Republican lawmakers because a Republican president would make the decisions about how to run the government during the shutdown. Second, and very closely related, Republicans now have a working majority in the House of Representatives. They used to need to rely on Democratic votes to pass funding bills, and Democrats hoped that Republicans would once again fail to pass their own bill and then need to come to Democrats for help. But President Trump has been able to knock heads together and bring the right wing of the House Republican Conference into line. And third, Trump has different policy objectives than he did in his first term. Last time around, he was trying to repeal Obamacare and cut taxes, and had no particular interest in otherwise shrinking the federal government. Now, he wants to slash and burn, which makes him less fazed by any problems a shutdown might cause and more keen on the kinds of spending-control powers that a shutdown gives him.

Those changes have taken away Democrats’ leverage and made their ability to force a shutdown — which I will again grant that they have — not useful for producing their preferred policy outcomes.

The solution to many of Democrats’ policy problems with the Trump administration lies with the courts. DOGE’s actions to cancel the spending of appropriated funds are in violation of the Impoundment Control Act. Either DOGE’s actions will get blocked in the courts, or (less likely, in my view) the Supreme Court will find that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, in which case any new legal requirements Democrats want to impose to actually spend appropriated funds would do no good anyway. But the only solution to the political problem of Democrats losing their leverage over spending negotiations is to win more elections — most importantly, to win back the House majority in 2026.

The importance of winning majorities is why Democrats should nominate more moderate candidates who can win in challenging districts — if there were five more Democrats in the House, we wouldn’t be in this mess or a lot of the other messes we’re in right now; even if all five of those added Democrats were dissidents like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden who annoy activists by catering to the voters in their Trump-won districts, Democrats would still control what legislation could come to the House floor. More broadly, it’s why Democrats should focus on building a bigger tent that welcomes in officials and voters who don’t agree with the party line on everything, instead of imposing tons of purity tests and building a party that is ideologically cohesive and prone to losing. That project is an important one that I hope the party is already on a path toward implementing. But it cannot bear (federal) electoral fruit in any case until next year.

With all of that said, you are now welcome to send me your emails explaining why I am wrong about what would (again, I emphasize: would) happen if Senate Democrats showed “fight” and “spine” and blocked the CR.

Very seriously,

Josh

Correction: An earlier version of this article gave the wrong name for the federal law requiring the executive branch to spend appropriated funds. This law is the Impoundment Control Act, not the Antideficiency Act, which is a law prohibiting the executive branch from spending unappropriated funds.

1. Before you email me to complain that I’m treating Democrats as the only party with agency here, I am not. We can easily run the analysis in the opposite direction: suppose that Democrats block passage of the CR and leave Republicans with a binary choice between accepting Democrats’ proposal for a 4-week stopgap or letting the government shut down. The problem is that Republicans do have agency and will use that agency to let the government shut down. The fact that a shutdown is an entirely acceptable outcome to Republicans (because it actually increases Trump’s power) is the whole problem here: it’s why Democrats cannot gain leverage.