Anger was rising in the Democratic ranks Saturday after the party’s top US senator led a band of lawmakers in reluctant support of a Republican measure that prevented a government shutdown.
Congressional passage of the controversial spending bill was being seen as a setback for Democratic backbenchers — and the latest illustration of political impotence of party leaders in their opposition to President Donald Trump as he takes a wrecking ball to the US federal bureaucracy.
“Democrats must fight back, not roll over,” congresswoman Nydia Velazquez declared Friday as she implored her fellow Democrats in the Senate to reject the spending proposal that grassroots members of the party warn is packed with harmful cuts.
The measure slashes billions of dollars from public spending at a time government agencies are already reeling from the dismissal of thousands of civil servants by Trump and his chief waste hunter, Elon Musk.
The appeals of Velazquez and others, including popular House progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were in vain, as the resolution passed the Senate late Friday with the support of 10 Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
The 74-year-old top Democrat had initially claimed this week that his camp was united in opposition to the Trump-backed Republican proposal. But on Thursday he relented and declared he would vote in favor in order to keep the government’s lights on.
Disunity
Schumer justified his position as the least worst path, and “the best way to minimize the harm that the Trump administration will do to the American people.”
His close Senate ally Dick Durbin agreed.
“With Donald Trump and Elon Musk taking a chainsaw to the federal government’s workforce and illegally freezing federal funding, the last thing we need to do is plunge our country into further chaos and turmoil by shutting down the government,” Durbin said.
But within their camp, it has been a bitter pill to swallow.
“Today was a bad day for the country, and I won’t sugarcoat it, today was also a bad day for the Democratic Party,” Senator Adam Schiff of California said in a video posted on X after the vote.
With no control of the White House, either chamber of Congress, or the US Supreme Court, “the only hope that we have of standing up to this president, of pushing back against the destructive actions he’s taking, is if we stay together,” Schiff said, lamenting the Democratic disunity in the Senate.
But in an angry post on the Bluesky platform, New York progressive Ocasio-Cortez said Senate Democrats had “destroyed” their chances of future cooperation with their House counterparts through their “fear-based, inexplicable abdication.”
She added: “They own what happens next.”
Still, top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries sought to play down the divisions.
“Our party is not a cult, we are a coalition,” he said in a statement after the Senate vote. “On occasion, we may strongly disagree about a particular course of action.”
‘No more cowardice’
Earlier this week progressive congresswoman Pramila Jayapal warned on CNN that Democratic senators who vote for the GOP plan would face a “huge backlash.”
Schumer has already felt the heat, with some 100 demonstrators protesting outside his New York home on Friday.
Members of the Sunrise Movement, an association of young environmentalists, gathered outside the senator’s Washington office “demanding he fight for our generation and block Trump’s disastrous budget.”
“No more cowardice,” the organization vented on X. “Step up or step aside.”
The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, voiced similar sentiments, warning that Democrats who voted yes “just handed Musk and Trump free rein to destroy our environmental agencies and gut the civil service.”
Meanwhile, Republicans led by Trump are rejoicing at the opposition’s disarray.
“Congratulations to Chuck Schumer for doing the right thing,” the president trumpeted from his Truth Social account Friday, saying it took “‘guts’ and courage.”
