This one’s aimed at our own side, because it deserves to be.
Senate leaders — Republican Susan Collins and Democrat Patty Murray, the Appropriations Committee’s chair and ranking member — unveiled a bipartisan continuing resolution on Sunday that funds the government at current levels through December 11, sailing well past the September 30 shutdown deadline and, not coincidentally, well past the November 3 midterms. Schumer called it “a responsible path forward.” Murray said it “rejects Trump’s frivolous war spending wish list” and closes loopholes on OMB’s push to politicize federal grants.
Here’s the problem with “responsible”: responsible for whom, and timed for what?
THE PATTERN THAT SHOULD BOTHER YOU
Read the framing in the reporting itself: lawmakers are “eager to act early to avoid a shutdown ahead of the midterm elections this fall.” That’s the quiet part said out loud. This isn’t a funding deal negotiated on the merits and it happens to land before an election. The timing is the point — both parties would rather defuse the shutdown fight now than let voters watch it play out in real time in October, with all the attack ads and blame-casting that comes with it.
Schumer, specifically, “faced pressure to leverage the funding fights for his party” after the record shutdowns of the past year — and instead of using that leverage heading into the single most consequential midterm cycle in recent memory, Senate Democrats are helping Republicans avoid the mess entirely. If you believe, as this project does, that this administration’s conduct over the past eighteen months has been genuinely dangerous — the casualty count manipulation, the shakedowns, the illegal surveillance, the execution spree, the redistricting power grab — then a government shutdown fight is one of the only structural moments where Democrats actually hold real, undeniable leverage. That leverage gets spent once. Handing it away quietly in early August, before the fight even happens, means walking into November having already given away the one card that forces the other side to negotiate.
WHAT’S ACTUALLY IN THE DEAL, TO BE FAIR
Some real wins here, and they’re worth naming honestly rather than pretending this is pure capitulation: the CR blocks OMB’s contested proposal to politicize federal grant funding for the duration of the extension, includes funding adjustments for WIC, national security shipbuilding programs, and the Disaster Relief Fund, and — per DeLauro’s own statement — represents “a clear improvement” over the version House Republicans tried to force through two weeks earlier. It’s not nothing.
But DeLauro’s statement also contains the more honest verdict buried in the diplomatic language: “we are still nearly two months away from the end of the fiscal year and should be working together to pass full-year funding bills.” Translation, from a Democrat: this is a patch, not a solution, and everyone involved knows it’s designed to buy political cover rather than resolve anything.
THE PART THAT MATTERS MOST
The bill still has to clear the House, where Speaker Johnson already passed his own version through December 4 along party lines, setting up a real fight when the House returns August 31. So there’s still a chance this gets contested properly. But the Senate — the chamber where Democrats actually have real filibuster leverage, the 60-vote threshold Murray and Schumer both know how to use — just volunteered to make that fight easier for the other side, right as the electorate is about to decide whether any of this administration’s conduct gets a check.
Zero Republicans elected doesn’t mean much if the opposition keeps declining to use the leverage it already has.