Democrats are taking a much tougher stance on the looming deadline to keep the government open than they did earlier this year, warning there will be a shutdown if Republicans attempt to jam them with another partisan stopgap funding measure from the House.
Spurred on by disgruntled progressives who want to see them fight, Democrats are breathing fire after President Trump thumbed his nose at Congress last week by proposing a pocket rescission, which would allow his White House budget director to rescind $5 billion in previously appropriated funding without any input from Capitol Hill.
Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Wednesday that Democrats are willing to negotiate bipartisan bills but warned “if House Republicans … go a different route and try to jam through a partisan CR without any input from Democratic members of Congress,” they may not have enough Democratic votes to keep the government open.
“That is a Republican shutdown,” she said. “There is no reason for Republicans to walk away from this table, not after the progress we made this summer,” she said, referring to the bipartisan appropriations bills passed out of the Senate Appropriations panel.
Murray urged Republicans to “ignore” Russell Vought, director of the Office and Management and Budget, who is pushing a pocket rescission to claw back $5 billion in funding from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Democrats say they’re in a better position politically to insist on a bipartisan government funding deal than they were in March, fewer than two months after Trump was sworn into office.
“One thing that’s different from back then: Donald Trump at the beginning of this year, he was 9 points up [in the polls]. He’s [now] 9 points under,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said.
“It is a very different situation and they know it,” she said, referring to Republican colleagues.
Still reeling from their loss of the White House and Senate in the 2024 election, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and a handful of colleagues voted in March for a partisan, Republican-crafted funding package, which sparked intense backlash from the Democratic base.
Schumer doesn’t want to provoke another fight within his party at a time when he thinks Democrats are gaining political traction by highlighting rising costs and Republican cuts to health care spending.
“We Democrats want a bipartisan bill and we are pushing the Republicans very hard to do it. We’re on our front foot, we’re unified, we’re strong on health care. They’re all divided and fighting with each other,” Schumer told reporters, arguing his party is better positioned heading into the fight than Republicans
“It’s much different than last time,” he added. “People now know … how bad Trump is. His [approval] numbers went from 52 to 43.”
He and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) are demanding that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) meet with them in a “four corners” negotiation to set out the parameters of a spending deal.
Republican leaders have refused, and instead want the GOP chairs of the House and Senate Appropriations committees to craft the stopgap spending measure in consultation with the Trump White House.
The plan is to pass the bill produced by that negotiation first through the House and then send it to the Senate before dispatching it to Trump for his signature.
“The CR, hopefully, will come from the House, would be my expectation,” Thune told reporters Wednesday.
He said he wants the funding stopgap “built up around conversations that have been held between Tom Cole [R-Okla.], the chair of the Appropriations Committee in the House, and Sen. Susan Collins [R-Maine], the chair of the Appropriations Committee here in the Senate.”
“Obviously the White House is going to play a very big role in all of this, too,” he said.
Thune indicated he wants a deal with Democrats to pass a “clean” government stopgap funding measure to give his colleagues more time to pass the regular appropriations bills in October, November and December.
But Democrats say that Thune’s refusal to meet with Democratic leaders to agree to a framework for the talks is a red flag.
“We want a four-corners talk and we want to talk with the president,” said a Democratic senator, who requested anonymity to discuss internal Senate Democratic strategy.
“The process often is that you have at least an initial discussion among the four corners and the president to try to get everybody on the same page,” the senator said. “The fact that they don’t want to get everyone on the same page is an ominous sign that they want a shutdown.”
If Thune and Johnson refuse to meet with Democratic leaders, it will be up to Collins and Cole to bring their Democratic counterparts — Murray and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) — into the negotiation.
So far, Collins and Murray agree they would like to include the bipartisan Senate-passed bills funding military construction, veterans’ affairs, the Department of Agriculture and the legislative branch into the continuing resolution.
“My hope … is that we end up with a CR that includes the three bills that the Senate has passed,” Collins said, noting that the House has already passed its military construction and veterans affairs’ appropriations bill. Murray said Wednesday that she agrees with that approach.
But differences remain with Cole and other House Republicans.
The House has proposed top-line targets that would reduce spending by $45 billion compared with the full-year continuing resolution Congress passed in March.
Another major sticking point is the pocket rescission proposed by Trump and Vought.
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), a member of the Appropriations Committee, said he’s worried the pocket rescission could scuttle a spending deal with Democrats.
“I do not think this is a good idea and I think it’s going to give our Democratic colleagues a reason not to work with us on an appropriations process,” he said of the pocket rescission.
Other Senate Republicans are voicing similar concerns.
“The timing of it is obviously not the best,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said of the pocket rescission.
