Schumer clashes with liberal colleagues over House GOP funding bill

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) surprised Washington Thursday by announcing on the Senate floor that he would vote to advance a House Republican-drafted six-month government funding bill, splitting with fellow Senate Democrats who are loudly calling for the bill’s defeat.

Schumer’s announcement provides crucial political cover to Senate Democratic centrists who are thinking about voting for the House-passed bill to keep the government from shutting down, even though they have serious concerns about the House bill.

Centrists such as Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) have come under intense pressure from Senate Democratic liberals and progressive activists outside of Congress to defeat the House bill.

Liberals including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are spearheading calls to vote against the House proposal, which would make cuts to nondefense programs and wouldn’t prevent Trump from shifting around funding to favor his own priorities.

Warren argued the House bill would give President Trump and Elon Musk “a blank check to spend your taxpayer money however they want.”

“We need to push back,” she declared.

Sanders said it would “literally take food out of the mouths of hungry children, take healthcare away from seniors, and give a huge tax break to the wealthiest people on the planet.”

“It cannot pass,” he declared.

Merkley said the “House Republican plan is horrific.”

“And we should be, Hell No.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a progressive who is popular with the party’s base, urged supporters on social media to call Democratic senators and ask them to “vote NO on Cloture and NO on the Republican spending bill.”

She called a potential Senate vote on an alternative 30-day clean continuing resolution “a meaningless gesture.”

“Senate needs to fight,” she posted on X.

Under growing pressure from their left flank, several Democratic centrists said Wednesday evening and Thursday that they would vote against the House GOP spending proposal, even though they had earlier warned that the failure to pass it could trigger a devastating government shutdown.

Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), two centrists up for re-election in 2026, announced they would vote to block the House bill, as did Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who as recently as Monday warned that blocking the bill and possibly triggering a shutdown would be a “huge risk.”

Ossoff, who is considered the most vulnerable Senate Democratic incumbent, announced late Thursday evening — after Schumer’s announcement — that he would oppose the House bill.

He said the bill “guts NIH research into diseases like Alzheimer’s and maternal mortality, funding for the prevention of violence against women, and Army Corps of Engineers construction of water infrastructure.”

Slotkin, who won election to the Senate last year in a state that Trump carried, also announced late Thursday evening that she would vote against the House bill.

"I will be voting no on the continuing resolution tomorrow. First, because this bill is bad for Michigan. It makes significant cuts to Michigan's key infrastructure projects," she said. "But on top of that, my Republican colleagues offered no assurances that the money wouldn't be redirected at the whip of Elon Musk," she said.

One Democratic senator familiar with the tense internal debate over strategy said the strong arguments of liberal senators and the growing pressure from the base had moved votes in the caucus.

“Some of them may be changing their viewpoint here,” the senator said of colleagues’ shifting stances on the House bill. “We’ve had that robust debate.”

“We’ll see,” the lawmaker said Thursday morning of how the final vote would turn out. “I think people will see this as a massive sellout to an authoritarian president. You don’t stop a bully by handing over all of your lunch money.”

Faced with growing opposition within the Democratic caucus to the House bill — and a dwindling number of potential Democratic votes who could get the bill across the finish line — Schumer made the dramatic decision to tell colleagues at a lunch meeting Thursday that he would vote to advance the House bill.

Schumer then announced his decision on the Senate floor — marking an abrupt shift from what he said a day earlier, when he told Republicans that there weren’t enough votes to pass the House bill.

“Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House [continuing resolution,]” he declared on the Senate floor Wednesday.

“Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11 CR that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass. We should vote on that,” he insisted.

But Schumer backed away from that stance over the span of less than 24 hours.

Republican senators, including Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine), swiftly rejected the idea of voting for a 30-day government funding stopgap, arguing it was too late and that the House had already left town for the week with no plans to return before the Friday deadline.

With the 30-day clean CR that he demanded dead in the water, Schumer faced the possibility that Democratic colleagues would follow the urging of more liberal senators and vote down the House-passed bill, which would likely trigger a shutdown.

Schumer intervened by announcing on the Senate floor that he would vote to advance the House bill.

He acknowledged that the House bill is “very bad,” but warned that a government shutdown would produce a far worse result.

“I believe it is my job to make the best choice for the country, to minimize the harms to the American people. Therefore, I will vote to keep the government open and not shut it down,” he said.

He warned that a shutdown “would give Donald Trump and Elon Musk carte blanche to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now.”

He said it would give the Trump administration “full authority to deem whole agencies, programs and personnel ‘non-essential,’” and furlough federal workers indefinitely.

And he warned that there would be “nobody left at agencies to check” Trump’s political advisors and appointees.

He noted that many federal employees and government experts fear that a temporary shutdown could lead to permanent cuts and that congressional Republicans would use their majorities to “cherry-pick” which parts of the government to reopen.

Asked if the House bill would have enough Democratic votes to squeak through the Senate, Schumer told reporters that his colleagues are reviewing it.

“There are a bunch of undecided votes and as members study it and look at it, each will make his or her own decision,” he later told reporters at a pen-and-pad briefing.

Schumer’s decision to vote to advance the House bill was immediately criticized on the left, including by Ocasio-Cortez.

The progressive firebrand from New York told CNN on Thursday that it would be a “tremendous mistake” for Schumer to vote for the cloture motion to advance the bill.

Asked if she would Schumer for his seat in 2028, Ocasio-Cortez said: “I think what we need right now is a united Senate Democratic Caucus that can stand up for this country and not vote for cloture and not vote for this bill.”

Asked if he was worried about the criticism, Schumer told reporters Thursday evening that he did what he thought best.

“The bottom line is you have to make these decisions based on what is best for not only your party, but your country,” he said.

“I firmly believe … that I’ve made the right decision,” he said. “I believe that my members understand that I came to that conclusion and respect it. … People realize it’s a tough choice but realize I made the decision based on what I thought were the merits and I think they respect it.”

Democrats across the Senate slammed the House bill this week as an atrocious piece of legislation.

Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, called it a “dumpster fire.”

She noted it would cut nondefense spending programs by $15 billion in 2025 and argued it would hand “a blank check to Trump and Elon Musk to pick winners and losers and steal from our constituents.”

She warned it would cut 44 percent from the Army Corps of Engineers’ work to protect against floods and hurricanes and leave a $280 million shortfall in the National Institutes of Health budget.

She called for Congress to immediately pas a clean four-week CR instead.

But Schumer told reporters Thursday evening that the month-long stopgap could pass the Senate.

“Patty Murray worked extremely hard as did our Appropriations Committee members to get Republicans to go along with a 30-day bill so they could do what they really like to do, which is write a whole big appropriations bill, and they wouldn’t go along,” he told reporters.

“That’s regrettable, very, very regrettable,” he said.

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