The Looming Shutdown Is a Test for the Democrats’ Resolve

On Friday morning, the House passed a stopgap measure to keep the government’s lights on through November 21, in a mostly party-line vote. But it failed in the Senate later in the afternoon as Democrats stood against it, setting the stage for a shutdown at the end of the month.

“Our Republican colleagues seem to think Americans are happy with the direction of this country,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Friday. “They’re voting like they think the status quo is good enough, even though they’ve heard from so many of their constituents the fear of hospitals closing, of health care being diminished, of premiums going way up.”

Schumer, of course, blinked during his first standoff with this Republican majority six months ago, arguing that a shutdown would do more harm than good—and angering fellow Democrats, who lamented that he had relinquished the little leverage he had. Not so this time: “The situation is much different,” Schumer told reporters on Tuesday.

In March, he had worried that Donald Trump and Elon Musk would use a shutdown not only as a political attack line against Democrats, but that they would exploit it to consolidate even more power. But Trump’s power grab is only accelerating, and the MAGA right has gone from accusing Democrats of obstruction to all but casting them as terrorists, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder on a college campus in Utah last week—an event the administration is using to justify a crackdown on “the left.”

It’s an extraordinarily dangerous moment in the country—and both progressives who opposed Schumer’s capitulation in March and more moderate figures like Ezra Klein are now warning that partnering with Republicans to keep the government open would be to effectively collaborate with a president that is using government “to hound his enemies, to line his pockets and to entrench his power.”

“Democrats, morally speaking, should not fund a government that Trump is turning into a tool of personal enrichment and power,” Klein wrote earlier this month. “Joining Republicans to fund this government is worse than failing at opposition. It’s complicity.”

The opposition party played hardball Friday. But where things go from here remains to be seen. Democrats, in their own funding bill, have planted their flag on healthcare, demanding Obamacare subsidies be extended and Medicaid cuts in Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” be reversed. “It’s the Republican shutdown,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said on the floor of the lower chamber Friday. “We’re fighting for the healthcare of the American people.”

But Republicans have given little indication they’ll budge from a “clean” continuing resolution. And it’s unclear what negotiations will look like going forward, with lawmakers back on recess next week for Rosh Hashana and GOP leadership reportedly considering extending the break through the end of the month to put pressure on Democrats, who don’t seem to have an obvious path out of a shutdown: “I think what we’re trying to do is avoid things getting worse,” as Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman put it to Politico this week. “I don’t think victory is in anyone’s hopes and dreams in this moment.”