With less than a week until a potential government shutdown, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., said Sunday that she would “withhold” her vote to fund the government until Congress gets assurances from the Trump administration that money will be spent the way lawmakers intend.
“The president has been deciding how to spend the money any way he wants, even when we have a budget that both Democrats and Republicans voted on. That’s a constitutional issue, right?” Slotkin said in an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
“Everyone knows Congress has the power of the purse, so I just — until I see some assurances that whatever we pass next week is going to ensure that the money is spent the way Congress intends, I’m going to withhold my vote,” the first-term senator added.
Her comments come the day after House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., unveiled a short-term funding bill that would avert a government shutdown at the end of the week.
Other Democrats on Saturday, including the top Democrats on the Senate and House appropriations committees, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., slammed the bill.
Murray called it a “slush fund continuing resolution” and DeLauro said it was “a power grab for the White House and further allows unchecked billionaire Elon Musk and President [Donald] Trump to steal from the American people.”
Still, Republicans hold majorities — albeit slim ones — in the House and Senate.
Slotkin, who last week gave the official Democratic response to Trump’s lengthy address to a joint session of Congress, on Sunday also weighed in on the current state of the Democratic Party and whether it has a clear leader.
“I don’t think it’s a secret that Democrats have been on their heels since Trump won the election, right?” Slotkin told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker.
“I think you can’t get better until you admit you have a problem. And for me, that’s one of the things that I think some of the new voices in the party have really been agitating about, right?” said Slotkin, who won a statewide Senate election in Michigan as Trump also carried the state in November.
“New senators, new representatives, new folks who are like, ‘Hey, we need to do more, and we need to be showing that we’re actually having a plan to stand up on really important moments of inflection,’” the senator added. “So that’s what I’m trying to do from within.”
Slotkin also addressed the decision by Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, to disrupt Trump’s speech to Congress on Tuesday by waving his cane at the president until the sergeant at arms escorted him out.
“There’s so much frustration with the Trump administration, there’s so much concern that what you saw was sort of the emotion and wanting to be visible,” the senator said of Green. “It’s not personally, the way I reacted.”
“I know Congressman Green, and it was clearly something he felt very passionately. It’s just not my No. 1 go-to approach,” she added.
On Thursday, Green was censured on the House floor by his colleagues in a bipartisan vote condemning his actions.
Slotkin also called on Democrats and Republicans to “do better and act like adults” to balance the federal budget.
“We have a situation where the politics are so broken between Democrats and Republicans that what seems logical, right, people getting in a room and saying, ‘Look, we’ve got to live within our means,’” Slotkin said. “That means we can’t spend as much and we can’t cut the money coming into the household, to the federal budget by millions and millions and millions. We have to make the balance work.”
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