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Thune throws a wrench in Schumer Shutdown with new funding bill

October 16, 2025 | | Print Article

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is shifting strategy as he looks to end the “Schumer Shutdown” and plans to bring a full-year Pentagon spending bill up for a vote, daring Democrats to oppose it.

With Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) having been able to maintain nearly lockstep resistance with his caucus, repeatedly refusing to do the right thing by funding the federal government, the shutdown has now dragged on for more than two weeks with no end in sight as Democrats continue to gaslight Americans that they are taking a principled stand to defend healthcare.

On Wednesday, Schumer’s gang stuck together to defeat yet another effort to pass the “clean” stopgap funding bill that has already been approved by the House, the ninth time that they defeated the continuing resolution, choosing to engage in purely partisan politics without a care in the world that real Americans are going to suffer.

The Pentagon funding bill passed out of committee earlier this year, 26-3, drawing bipartisan support. And it would fund military paychecks, a longer solution than the “temporary fix” of Trump’s Wednesday order directing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth “to use for the purpose of pay and allowances any funds appropriated by the Congress that remain available for expenditure in Fiscal Year 2026 to accomplish the scheduled disbursement of military pay and allowances for active duty military personnel.”

Bringing the bill up for a vote is a curveball for Democrats, who, if they vote against it, will be voting against paying the troops, inflicting unnecessary financial hardship on military families heading into the holiday season.

“It seems like it’s a hard vote,” Thune said on Wednesday. “Because they all say they want a normal appropriations process, and we’re trying to give them one. I get it, it’s in the middle of a shutdown, which is a complicating dynamic here.”

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“We need to get the appropriations process going either way,” the Senate majority leader told The Hill. “If we’re sitting around here voting every day and they keep voting to keep the government shut down, we need to be trying to move the needle on some of the other stuff that we need to get done.”

“Democrats’ motivation is pleasing their far-left base and preserving their political careers. Meanwhile, military families are lining up at food banks, and flights are delayed because of understaffed airport towers,” Thune said in a Wednesday post to X. “We need to reopen the government for the American people.”

“The problem we have right now is that, in spite of President Trump’s heroic efforts to make sure they get paid, that is a temporary fix,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told reporters at a Wednesday press conference.

“The executive branch, his help, is not permanent. It can’t be,” he said. “And if the Democrats continue to vote to keep the government closed as they have done so many times, then we know U.S. troops are going to risk missing a full paycheck at the end of this month.”

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Chris Donaldson
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