Govt Funding: Can Trump Claim a Win No Matter How the Senate Votes?

Senate Democrats face a tough – and divisive – choice.

Senate Democrats have a hard choice to make on the House GOP’s continuing resolution (CR) – and they can’t put it off any longer. The former temporary spending bill – and the funding it provided – expires at midnight, Friday, March 14. Will the lawmakers of the left swallow their pride and support a CR that’s difficult for them to stomach, or will they instead balk and allow a partial government shutdown to begin over the weekend? Neither option looks good to the Democrats – and either could be claimed as a win by President Donald Trump.

Calling Someone’s Bluff Is Always Risky

Forget the “one big, beautiful bill” or even the slightly less bombastic two-part effort of Senate Republicans; the larger reconciliation process is still likely months away from resulting in anything President Trump can sign into law. Right now, there are more immediate matters. The stopgap funding passed in December of last year expires tonight. The House (led by the GOP majority) passed its CR to get through September of this year 217-213, with one member of each party crossing the aisle.

As Liberty Nation News explained shortly after, however, a party-line vote in the Senate won’t cut it. Legislation requires 60 votes to pass, and the Republican majority is 53 to 47. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has already signaled he won’t vote for it, and Senate Democrats were quite vociferously against it, even demanding the House help pass a separate one-month version. But that was then, with more than 24 hours on the clock. As it turns out, it seems some Senate Democrats – including the party leader, Chuck Schumer of New York – have decided that passing a CR they can’t stand represents the lesser of two evils.

Does Trump Win No Matter How the Senate Votes?

While many Senate Democrats rejected the House spending package immediately, others expressed concern over what a shutdown would look like under a president already trying to trim the government fat. “The president has shown a willingness to cut far and wide, really on impulse in many cases,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) warned after the vote on Tuesday. “If you shut down, he decides what is essential. [Trump] is the one who decides which arms get actually shut down. In a strange way, [a government shutdown] gives him even more power.”

Senate Minority Leader Schumer was ultimately singing the same tune – reversing his previously stated position. On Wednesday, the New Yorker vowed his party wouldn’t allow it to pass. Just one day later on the Senate floor, though, he reluctantly declared his grudging support.

“For sure, the Republican bill is a terrible option,” he said. “It is not a clean CR. It is deeply partisan. It doesn’t address far too many of this country’s needs. But I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.”

“I will vote to keep the government open and not shut it down,” he conceded. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) seemed resigned to supporting it as well, though he didn’t explicitly say he would. Rather, he mused that perhaps they could get some amendments passed so it isn’t a total loss. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) also said he would vote to pass the temporary spending package.

Does Donald Trump actually want a partial shutdown due to lack of government funding? As Schumer speculated in a guest essay for The New York Times, “a shutdown would give Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk permission to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now.”

He proposes that, under a shutdown, DOGE could furlough staff and cut departments almost at will. Then, he claims, congressional Republicans could “weaponize their majorities” to only fund and reopen the parts of the government they want while leaving the rest shuttered. “Finally, a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda,” the lawmaker lamented.

Strip away the politically loaded language and the blatant bias, and it does sound like an almost ideal situation for Trump, Musk, and the folks over at DOGE who want to cut government waste. And that – with or without belief in the fearmongering rhetoric – probably is a nightmare scenario for any statist.

So, unless he changes his mind again, the leader of the Senate Democrats and at least one other of his comrades will vote with most of the Republicans today to pass the continuing resolution crafted by the House GOP. The question now is who else on that side of the aisle will see the CR as the lesser of two evils.