Stopgap Spending Clears the House, but Will It Survive the Senate?

GOP continuing resolution or government shutdown: Senate Democrats face a tough choice.

House Republicans passed a continuing resolution (CR) Tuesday to fund the government at roughly the current level through September 2025. Now it goes to the Senate, and the Democrats find themselves faced with a tough decision: Should they vote in support of a spending bill they don’t support or let the current CR – and the funding for continued government operation – expire on Friday?

A Spending Bill to Get By On

On March 11, House Republicans managed to squeak their CR through on a mostly party-line vote of 217-213. Thomas Massie of Kentucky was the lone Republican to oppose the bill, while Jared Golden of Maine was the only Democrat to support it.

Rep. Golden said the CR isn’t perfect, but it’s better than a shutdown. “Even a brief shutdown would introduce more chaos and uncertainty at a time when our country can ill-afford it,” Golden posted on X. He went on to lambast his fellow Democrats for using what he called “messaging gimmicks” about the bill.

The 99-page bill includes an additional $6 billion for veterans’ health care. It also includes a boost in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and adds about $500 million to WIC, a program that provides food and nutritional aid for low-income women, infants, and children. Overall, however, the non-defense spending has been cut by about $13 billion from last year’s amount. This has Democrats outraged.

A Congressional Conundrum

The simple majority required to pass a bill through the House isn’t difficult for Republicans to manage right now, so long as they stand together. They can pass pretty much whatever they want, so long as no more than one of their own opposes. That leaves the Democrats in the lower chamber plenty of room to virtue signal through opposition without any real risk of shouldering the blame for a shutdown. Senate Democrats, however, don’t have that luxury – and it shows in their indecisiveness over this very spending package. No amount of GOP unity can save this bill in the upper chamber if it can’t hit the 60-vote threshold with Democrat backing, and that means the blame dynamics are a bit different.

“There are only two options: One is to vote for a pretty bad CR. Or the other is to vote for a potentially even worse shutdown,” Sen. Angus King, Maine’s independent senator who caucuses with Democrats, said after the House vote. “So it’s a very tough choice.”

While many Democrats seem undecided, others have taken a stance against it. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called it a “shutdown bill,” and claimed in a floor speech Tuesday night that Republicans would bear responsibility for it. “Democrats in the House showed us they are united,” Warren explained. “Why should it be different in the Senate?”

It’s easy, however, to simply declare that the other side will bear the fault if something doesn’t work out. Who the people will actually blame after the fact remains to be seen. Yes, the House passed a CR that the Democrats clearly don’t like – then they recessed for a week, so there’s no possibility of any changes being approved by the lower chamber before the previous CR and the current government funding runs out Friday, March 14.

But even with the 53-47 lead that Republicans enjoy in the Senate, they fall seven votes short of passing this bill even if 100% of the party were in line – and it looks as if they don’t have it this time. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has promised not to support the spending bill, meaning the measure’s success hinges on losing no more Republicans and gaining at least eight Democrats.

If the bill fails, it will clearly be because Democrats rejected it. Failing to see that requires a failure to understand basic mathematics. What Democrats must do in this case is convince the people that it’s the Republicans’ fault for putting forth a bill no Democrat could ethically support – a shutdown bill, as Sen. Warren puts it. Only if they can convince voters that passing the bill and getting some funding would have actually been worse than having no funding at all and allowing a shutdown to occur can they successfully shift the blame to the GOP – and that may be a tall order.