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Schumer blinks, bails on Dems’ shutdown suicide mission

March 14, 2025 | | Print Article

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he will vote to keep the federal government open, bailing on his party’s kamikaze mission to stick it to President Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk by punishing ordinary Americans.

After initially talking tough about Senate Democrats refusing to vote for cloture on the continuing resolution approved by House Republicans to fund the government and avert a partial shutdown, Schumer flip-flopped, infuriating leftists who are accusing him of selling out.

“I believe it is my job to make the best choice for the country to minimize the harm to the American people. Therefore, I will vote to keep the government open and not shut it down,” Schumer said from the Senate floor on Thursday.

With his humiliating climbdown, Schumer is indicating that enough Democrats will join him to end a filibuster, a legislative tactic that the party has suddenly developed an appreciation for after trying to eliminate it during the Biden years.

The New York Democrat’s running up the white flag came after heated debate with some of the party’s senators warning that allowing a shutdown would be political suicide. His mind may have also been changed after #SchumerShutdown started trending, an early sign the hypocritical protest would backfire and that he would be the one who got the blame.

“I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option,” Schumer said after airing his grievances with the House stopgap funding bill.

Schumer also announced his reversal in an op-ed published by the New York Times, his hometown propaganda rag.

“Republicans’ nihilism has brought us to a new brink of disaster: Unless Congress acts, the federal government will shut down Friday at midnight,” he wrote. “As I have said many times, there are no winners in a government shutdown. But there are certainly victims: the most vulnerable Americans, those who rely on federal programs to feed their families, get medical care and stay financially afloat. Communities that depend on government services to function will suffer.”

Schumer’s change of heart didn’t go over well with many Democrats with one of them being Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) who argued that voting for the CR would only empower Trump and would be worse than shutting it all down.

“This is saying, let’s just give up even more of our Constitutional authority, because, hey, he can do a lot worse later on. And so to me, that’s capitulating to someone who’s already showing that he’s reckless and willing to do a lot of destruction… We are in a perverse bizarro land where we’re having to decide between letting Donald Trump wreck the government this way or wreck the government that way,” Booker told CNN’s Manu Raju.

House Democrats were also fuming, issuing a statement although they stopped short of naming Schumer.

“We want the attention of the American people, not focused on different bills that they would bring to the floor during the shutdown. We’d rather focus on our message, which is beginning to work,” Schumer told reporters on Thursday night, expressing optimism that the Democrat gaslighting is still effective at conning some gullible people.

“In a shutdown, we would be busy fighting with Republicans over which agencies to reopen and which to keep closed instead of debating the damage Mr. Trump’s agenda is causing,” the Democrat leader wrote in his NYT column. “I believe it is my job to make the best choice for the country, to minimize the harm to the American people. Therefore, I will vote to keep the government open.”

Chris Donaldson
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