Is Our Democrats Learning? UPDATE: No [View all]

Trump’s team said one too many times that Congress doesn’t matter. Will enough Senate Democrats try to make sure they do?[

by David Dayen

March 13, 2025

UPDATE: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced the he would vote for cloture on the House government funding bill in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon. Democrats have made the calculation that eliminating themselves as a governmental partner is preferable to putting up a fight. I hope they enjoy their recess. You can read this story on the stakes below.

The headline is hard to ignore. “Trump crafts plan to cut spending without Congress after shutdown is averted,” according to Fox News. The idea is that Congress would send the House-passed continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year to the president—with the participation of Senate Democrats—and Donald Trump and his minions would just rip it up and decide unilaterally what they wanted to spend money on.

This is no big secret; it’s one of the signature pillars of Project 2025, the years-in-the-making brainchild of Russ Vought to centralize all federal spending in the executive branch. But when you say it so brazenly out loud, and when in particular say that this will get started just as soon as Congress sends over that bill before the March 14 deadline, Senate Democrats, who were plotting an open secret of their own, might take notice.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-03-13-is-our-democrats-learning/