Democrats Put Themselves in a Corner on the Government Shutdown

With the House having passed a non-perfect continuing resolution to fund the government until September, it’s the Senate’s turn to act. Meanwhile, Democrats have spent the entirety of Trump’s first couple of months in office crying tears over government layoffs and down-sizing at the hands of Elon Musk’s DOGE.

However, it now appears that the Dems are ready to go all-in on shutting down the government over their concerns about, um, Trump reducing the size of government.

Scn. Chuck Schumer says they’ll die on this hill for some reason, according to NBC News:

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday that Democrats would reject a government funding bill that Republicans wrote and passed through the House, leaving it uncertain whether Congress can avert a shutdown before Friday night’s deadline.

The House on Tuesday narrowly approved a continuing resolution to keep the government funded through the end of September.

“Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort, but Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input — any input — from congressional Democrats. Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR,” Schumer said on the floor, calling for a one-month funding bill that provides more time to negotiate a deal.

To that end, fine. Go right ahead and let the funding expire. That should give DOGE and the rest of Trump’s cabinet more time and less friction when seeking to cut more fraud, waste, and abuse within the bureaucracy. It’s just as Musk said toward the beginning of the process about government agencies closing for weekends, which he compared to an opposing team leaving the field mid-game.

Schumer is playing the only card he has, which will work with his left-wing base of crazies bent on fighting any effort to curtail the size of government. Still, though, it seems counterintuitive and counterproductive to demonstrate how much of government can be turned off while the country still functions just fine.

If you wanted to make a commercial for DOGE, then by all means, send us into a government shutdown.

What Democrats are counting on is that the media will blame Republicans for the shutdown and the American public will go along with it. That’s not how things have been going, however, since the days of legacy media writing the narrative are dead and gone. What worked during Trump’s first term for Democrats and their media accomplices hasn’t been successful this time around. The American people know what they voted for and what they want. The media is no longer driving perception the way it used to.

If Democrats fear they may take the bulk of the backlash for a shutdown, they might relent before a shutdown happens. On the other hand, they seem pretty dug in and determined to fight Trump’s agenda with the only levers they have.

It’s currently a game of chicken, and Trump sees no reason to blink first, nor should he. Will Democrats hold out or realize they stand to gain nothing from this stunt?