Face The Nation: Stopgap Funding Bill Heads To Senate, Lawmakers React To Education Department Layoffs

"The House of Representatives narrowly passed a Republican-led continuing resolution to keep the government funded. Now the Senate must reach an agreement before the government shutdown deadline approaches. CBS News' Taurean Small reports." 

Source:Face The Nation with a look at the 119th U.S. Congress.

From Face The Nation

As my colleague Rik Schneider wrote about this yesterday: 

"Just for the record: I'm not in favor of forced government shutdowns, whether they're done by Republicans (which is normally the case) or by Democrats, which was led by Senate Minority Chuck Schumer in 2018. The politics is bad, but worst, if disrupts the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of government workers who need their jobs, as well as local businesses who rely on those workers to stay in business. 

But, this is Tuesday and any potential government shutdown wouldn't be until 11:59PM Friday night. And asking Democrats to vote for a continuing resolution that probably cuts Medicaid anyway, is bad politics for them, its bad politics for vulnerable House Republicans, perhaps even Senate Republicans as well. One 1 House Democrat out of 215: Representative Jared Golden (Democrat, Maine) voted for it. So House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries gets this as well. 

So now the bill goes to the Senate where Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will have a big decision to make: 

block the bill, where Majority Leader John Thune would need 60 votes to get to final passage on it. 

allow the bill to come up and tell your members to vote for cloture, but lock in all your members to vote against it and then use those Senate Republican votes against vulnerable Senate Republicans in 2026 when they have to run for reelection, where President Trump will probably be pretty unpopular by then (unless he drastically changes course) 

Or, work with the Senate Majority Leader to get a compromise that both sides in the Senate could support, that would pass the House overwhelmingly (if it just came to the floor... 

From The New Democrat

So it looks like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and company have selected option a, which is to try to block this bill in hopes that Senate Majority Leader John Thune would sit down with Leader Schumer and they would work out a compromise. That's a really risky play. A lot of political incentive for the Majority Leader to say: 

"No. We're in charge, we won the elections, we have The White House and Congress. Go ahead and shut the government down and take the blame for it". 

Which would be my response even as a Democrat, (from a political standpoint) if the Democrats controlled The White House and Congress right now and someone was drunk, high, stupid, and crazy enough (trust me: plenty of people with all those characteristics at once in Washington) to elect me Senate Majority Leader. 

If John Thune doesn't compromise here, this would be the best case scenario: 

Senate Democrats relent and buck their leader and maybe 10 of them vote for cloture, just to avid the government shutdown on Friday. 

Worst case scenario: the government shuts down this weekend because Leader Schumer holds his members together and. So now we're in a shutdown next week and maybe Senate Democrats relent them because the politics here for them (especially if they're up for reelection in 26) is too bad for them. 

But as Rik Schneider said yesterday and I agree with him: 

"If they take James Carville''s advice, neither Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer will try to prevent Republicans from politically jumping off the bridge, or making sure they have parachutes before they jump out of the plane, or make sure they're sober enough to drive themselves home. They'll just let Congressional Republicans politically crash and burn on their own. 

If this is the choice for Chuck Schumer: let Republicans take full responsibility for their crash and burn style of politics and government, or be the voice of reason and just offer John Thune a clean continuing resolution, with no cuts or spending increases in it. And we'll see what Senate Democrats do this week." 

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