March 27, 2025

Opinion: Democrats had months to head off Schumer’s no-win dilemma

Author: Steven Pearlstein

Program: Fixing Congress

Office: Penn Washington

To hear it from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrats were faced with two terrible choices: force a lengthy government shutdown that would have hurt millions of ordinary Americans and given President Trump and Elon Musk an opportunity to disembowel more government programs, or acquiesce to a six-month Republican funding bill that would have hurt even more Americans and given Trump and Musk, even more headroom spend or not spend appropriated funds any way they liked.

As Schumer rationalizes it, there will be less harm to the country and — always key to Schumer’s calculus — better political prospects for Democrats because he and eight other Democrats chose tactical retreat over stubborn resistance.

But perhaps the better question to ask why Schumer and his fellow Democrats is why they allowed themselves to be maneuvered into a situation in which those were the only choices.

Recall that last year, the Senate, while still under Democratic control with a Democrat in the White House, failed to make good on its promise to pass all 12 appropriations bills before the start of the next fiscal year. Instead, Schumer and his caucus blithely agreed to a pair of “continuing resolutions” — one, before the election that funded the government until just before Christmas, then another until mid-March, by which time Republicans would control the White House and both houses of Congress.

Democrats offer any number of rationalizations for not resolving the funding issue when they still had the upper hand.

The lack of time in a “crowded” Senate calendar (no surprise when you only work three days a week!).  The imperative to give over every minute of available floor time confirming Democratic judges.  The reluctance to make “vulnerable” Members take “tough votes” in an election year.

But the real reason may be more prosaic: after 20 years of funding the government through short-term “continuing resolutions” and suffering no political consequences, leaders and Members of both parties have become addicted to kicking the can down the road and heading home for the weekend or the Christmas holiday.

Schumer’s miscalculation also exposed an even deeper problem for Democrats—their inability to frame issues and communicate with the public.

For the last two months, it has been crystal clear that Donald Trump would challenge Congress’s power and independence. Within hours of taking office, he and Musk began dismantling programs explicitly authorized and funded by Congress, firing employees, shuttering offices, canceling contracts, and rescinding grants.  And for two months, news about these initiatives – the human impacts, the court challenges, the growing grassroots opposition—have dominated the national political conversation.

What that also means is that for two months, Democrats should have known that the best strategy for slowing the Trump steamroller was to use the government funding bill to mount an effective challenge. Two months to educate the public that, under our political system, only Congress has the power to determine how much money will be spent and for which purposes. Two months to run hard-hitting ads not just in swing districts held by Republicans but in deep red areas where Republican voters could be made to imagine what the next Democratic president might do with the powers Trump claims to have.

Two months to make clear that Democrats were prepared to give ground on immigration and excessive wokism and accept reasonable cuts to wasteful and ineffective programs—and that any shutdown would be Trump’s and Musk’s fault, not theirs.

Instead, Democrats frittered away that time rehashing old arguments about whether they were too liberal or not liberal enough and working themselves up into a moral lather at Trump’s daily provocations. Party leaders were so fixated on keeping their caucuses unified they failed to notice there was no strategy or program to offer to unify around. When Republicans finally unveiled details of their spending bill in early March, all they could do was revert to their usual budget scare tactics, warning of the end of civilization as we know it because of relatively minor cuts to programs most Americans don’t know or care about (My favorite: “recklessly underfunding” the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service by $27 million).

In reality, the only Democratic strategy was to hope that three members of the House Freedom Caucus would make good on threats to vote against any funding bill, forcing Republicans to turn to Democrats for the votes to keep the government open. When Trump was able to bully and sweet talk all but one of the would-be House defectors into line, that strategy collapsed.

The better strategy would have been for Democrats from the beginning to frame the funding issue simply and powerfully as a referendum on Trump’s and Musk’s unconstitutional power grab.  

That would have meant forcing the Senate to take up the funding bill the moment it arrived from the House and mounting a break-out-the-cots filibuster up to and past the funding deadline. The political theater would have captured media and public attention and, put Republicans back on their heels and forced them to explain their acquiescence to one- (or maybe two-) man rule.

Would it have worked? It’s been so long since either party was willing to mount a serious filibuster that it is impossible to know. But one thing people forget is that when filibusters drag on, senators are forced to spend so much time in the same place with each other that a few start to talk and listen to each other and try to work something out. As often as not, some deal emerges.

The problem with Chuck Schumer isn’t that he’s unwilling to wage an all-out partisan battle against Trump and Republicans. The problem with Schumer is that, after so many years of tightly controlling things from the leadership office, he’s unwilling to trust a legislative process that lets senators legislate and brings voters in on the discussion, with no guarantee on how things will turn out in the end.

Steven Pearlstein is a Senior Fellow at Penn Washington. He is also the Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University and a former Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post. The views expressed here are his own.