Don't Blame Chuck Schumer for the New Politics of Shutdowns

It's not his fault that Republicans suddenly don't think a government shutdown is a political liability

The anger toward Democratic leadership is understandable. They’ve employed chaotic and weak tactics, if their actions even qualify as “tactics”. They don’t seem to be living in the same historical moment as the rest of us.

The battle over the recently passed continuing resolution (CR) is a case in point. The Democrats could have held strong and forced Republicans to heel with a filibuster, thereby stopping the CR in its tracks and instigating a government shutdown, assuming Republicans didn’t cave themselves.

It was a perfect storm of events. The budget deadline had been extended in Joe Biden’s final year in office to this point in time, when Republicans have control over all branches of government. Therefore, they own whatever pain the country goes through during their time in power.

So, a government shutdown on the Republican government’s watch appeared to favor the Democrats. Generally, the party that’s in power gets blamed for a shutdown. And since Republicans are the ones that generally get us to this point—largely because of irreconcilable infighting on the brink of budget deadlines while they’re in power—they’ve been the ones to suffer the consequences.

But a funny thing happened on the way to this budget deadline: Republicans unanimously changed their minds on government shutdowns being a political liability.

They now don’t care if the government shuts down. Or if they do, they are nonetheless following the lead of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are in the process of aggressively dismantling the federal government. Trump and Musk certainly don’t care and hold Republicans' electoral fates in their hands.

And not only that, Republicans are united this time. This is not the Republican party of the previous six years, when the wing nut faction always fought tooth and nail with the regular nut faction. It was almost a given that you could count on 5-10 defectors from the Republican caucus that would vote against a proposed budget and force a negotiation with Democrats.

But the winds have changed.

Every House Republican but one voted for the CR, sending the bill to the Senate.

Senate Dems had two choices: 1) Either filibuster the CR to try and force Republicans to negotiate and compromise, which likely would not have happened, and therefore caused a government shutdown; or 2) vote for the CR, giving Republicans a win in keeping the government open on the same budget it’s had since Nancy Pelosi was Speaker in 2022.

Rank-and-file Democrats were itching for a fight, and thrilled that Senate Democrats had the filibuster as leverage to force the Republicans into the choice to compromise on the CR or be the presiding party overseeing a government shutdown.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer opted to vote with the Republicans along with several other Senate Democrats, which ensured the passage of the CR on a filibuster-proof majority.

But, while, at first glance, it appears that Schumer “caved” on the continuing resolution, the reality is more complicated than that.

Well, no. Actually, it’s quite simple: don’t get in the way of Republicans destroying themselves politically.

Overt Action

First, by filibustering the CR in the Senate, the Democrats would be actively doing something that holds up the funding bill. They wouldn’t just be not voting with the Republicans; they would be taking action, via the filibuster, to prevent them from passing something.

This makes it easier to blame Democrats for not only the government shutdown, but also for any ensuing long-term economic pain and fallout.

At that rate they are going, Trump, Musk, and Congressional Republicans are already shoving the country into an ugly recession, possibly a years-long stagflation scenario not seen since the late 1970s, after only two months in power.

Why be responsible for adding more fuel to the fire that’s already been started by Trump and Musk? If the Democrats held up the CR and forced a shutdown, they would have engaged in what would easily be construed as a bipartisan destruction of the economy. It would diffuse the blame and anger across both parties, when only one could potentially be perceived as being responsible.

Ability to fight back

Second, by filibustering the CR and essentially shutting down the government, the Democrats lose the ability to fight back. Trump and Musk would have more ability to furlough federal workers and hamper government services.

Whereas now Democrats can sue and publicly push back in the hopes of restoring federal employment and effective government services, if they are complicit in a shutdown they would be more limited in their legal options. And the optics of fighting to keep the government open while having just ensured a shutdown would be contradictory and easy for Trump and Republicans to exploit.

Keeping the government open, but fighting against the ongoing attacks by Trump, Musk, and Republicans to render government cruelly ineffective would be a much more cohesive narrative for the public to comprehend. The good guys and bad guys would be much more clearly defined.

Causing a shutdown would create a situation where Democrats had to spend more time on defense trying to carve out a useful narrative where they aren’t perceived as the reckless idiots, when the reckless idiots are easily definable right now. Why throw a wrench in that?

New political reality

You might say “but how can you be sure that the government would have shut down? Maybe Republicans would finally cave themselves and negotiate compromises with Democrats”.

Sure, maybe this would happen. But given that Trump and Musk, with the full backing of Republicans, are currently unabashedly dismantling the government right now, it’s hard to imagine they’d feel pressure to negotiate their way out of a government shut down.

What would be their pressure points?

They are apparently totally cool with policies that have very low popularity, such as meddling with government entitlement programs, mass federal firings, incoherent applications of tariffs, and invading and/or annexing long time allies’ territories. So are they going to even feel the tightening vice grip that a government shutdown would apply around their necks?

Maybe. But they definitely seem more worried about Trump insulting them on social media and Musk funding a primary campaign against them than they are about their constituents turning on them.

They just won big in the 2024 election. Voters voted them in control of the whole government. They are obviously taking their chances that their actions are going to either be forgiven, forgotten, or praised by the voting public.

The only way around this is for the voters to vote against them in a big way in 2026. That will be the referendum on the popularity of their current behavior.

Schumer Doomers

Nothing I’ve written here is meant to condone Chuck Schumer and his status in Senate leadership.

In fact, quite the contrary. I don’t think he’s the best leader for this political moment. He’s old-school and from another era. He’s not dynamic or inspiring.

But is he incompetent and ineffective? Not at all.

In fact, he’s been a pretty competent and effective leader so far. Just look at what Democrats were able to accomplish when they had power by the slimmest of margins in the last several years.

But, like most of the aging Democratic leaders, he’s not an effective communicator or messenger for the political age in which we currently live. He could have played this better and laid out the stakes much earlier and more loudly than he did. He could have ginned up support for his decision by publicizing the impossible situation created by the Republicans.

But he went quiet, so it wasn’t clear that there even was an impossible choice. He put himself in a position to be blamed by the country if a shutdown occurred, or be blamed by the rank-and-file of his party if he voted for the CR. He went with the latter, but he could have set it up so that he was seen as shrewd and not be the target of attacks and calls to step down.

This is Schumer’s weakness, not his political maneuverings on policy and Senate politics.

He played an impossible hand relatively well. But no one knows about it, because he never explained it until the last minute. So now he’s helped create yet another Democratic controversy dividing the party, when it needs to stand unified against the Trump and Musk onslaught.

While it’s hard to blame people for being angry and wanting to see Schumer step down, it’s also true that he did the best thing available to him. He kept the status quo, which in this case is a path of likely Republican demise, perpetrated willingly on themselves.

By lending his hand to help them pass the CR, he withheld his hand to help them politically.

He did the smart thing. It’s not his fault that the politics of shutdowns has changed. He actually adjusted appropriately.

But if a smart political maneuver happens in a media void, it won’t make a sound.