Shutdown avoided as some Senate Dems – but not Kim or Booker – relent on GOP funding bill

The federal government will not shut down today, thanks to a critical group of Senate Democrats – among them Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – who voted to allow Republicans to bring up a controversial funding bill for a vote. New Jersey Senators Andy Kim and Cory Booker, however, both voted no on the bill, which is now on President Donald Trump’s desk, saying that it represented a giveaway to Trump and Elon Musk.

After the House passed a continuing resolution (CR) on Tuesday that keeps the government funded, largely at current levels, through September, Senate Democrats were placed in an uncomfortable position. Thanks to the Senate’s filibuster rules, some Democratic votes were needed in order to pass the CR; while Democrats disliked the bill for a variety of reasons, they also had little appetite for a shutdown, and there wasn’t an obvious opportunity for them to gain leverage even if they voted against it.

Booker and Kim, along with most of their Democratic colleagues, ultimately decided that they disapproved of the CR too greatly to vote for it, even with a shutdown looming.

“This hyper-partisan funding bill is a setback for our country and a win for the millionaires and billionaires the Trump administration is working for,” Kim said in a statement shortly after the vote. “We knew that no matter which way this vote went, families were going to be hurt. As Republicans gear up to gut Medicaid and take money from our schools, this can and will not be the last time this Congress has the chance to stand up against this lawlessness – and we must.”

“I will not support what congressional Republicans are calling a ‘Continuing Resolution’ because it’s not. It is a surrendering of the powers of Congress to the president and Elon Musk,” Booker said prior to the vote. “Congress has a job to do. We swore an oath to uphold the Constitution – not to surrender Article One constitutional powers to Trump and Musk. I don’t want them to have more power.”

But Schumer and nine of his fellow Democrats came to the opposite conclusion, saying that a shutdown would be a worse outcome than approving the GOP-written bill. The ten Democrats all voted for cloture on the CR, allowing it to break a filibuster, though all but two ended up voting against the actual passage of the bill; Democrats also forced a vote on a handful of amendments reinstating fired federal workers and restricting Musk’s ability to shift or cancel funds, but they were rejected.

The House had passed the CR earlier this week on a near-party line vote, with all New Jersey Democrats voting against it – an easier choice for them than it was in the Senate, since they possessed no mechanism equivalent to the filibuster that would have allowed them to block the bill.

Congress will be gone next week for a scheduled recess, but political troubles for Democrats – especially for the ten senators who relented on cloture – could just be beginning. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democratic candidate for governor this year, released a scathing statement prior to today’s vote saying that he believes Schumer should step aside because of his decision to vote for cloture.

“Leader Schumer, this is not the time for half-measures,” Baraka said. “We cannot keep bringing a squirt gun to a forest fire. The stakes are too high.”

And many House Democrats, too, are seething at their Senate counterparts who let a bill near-universally hated by their party pass anyways.

“The Republican continuing resolution that just passed the Senate is exactly what House Democrats have been fighting against all along,” Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark) said. “It was a bad bill when I voted against it earlier this week, and it’s still a bad bill today… I am beyond disappointed to see my colleagues in the Senate bend the knee to Republicans and force the American people to bear the consequences.”