As bad as things are right now, they could be even worse. In particular, the United States government could have shut down starting last weekend, with offices closed, millions of government workers furloughed, and millions of others being required to work without pay. There would also have been no clear path ever to reopen the government, which would have been great news to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their eager group of anarchists inside and outside of government.
Avoiding that shutdown took an act of clear-eyed courage from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, but rather than being thanked for risking his own reputation to steer the country away from a cataclysm, he is being savaged by many Democrats, pundits, NeverTrump conservatives, and others. Things are so bad that Schumer felt the need to postpone a planned book tour, with liberal activists raining criticism down upon him while calling for his resignation.
In this column, I will make four points. First, shutting the government down would have been absolutely the wrong move, and Schumer was right to lead Democrats away from that disaster (a disaster that would have been even more grave than the ones that we now face). Second, I am the last person who would be inclined to defend Schumer. Third, the felt need among those who oppose Trump to “do something” is understandable but cannot possibly justify “doing anything, just for the sake of doing it.” And fourth, even if I am wrong and Schumer’s decision was a mistake, the infighting must stop immediately. This is no way to run an opposition to emerging fascism.
A Shutdown Would Have Been Much Worse than the Alternative
When Schumer announced late last week that he and a small group of Senate Democrats would vote against shutting down the government, he explained his reasoning immediately afterward in an interview on Chris Hayes’s MSNBC show, followed by a guest op-ed in The New York Times. I appreciated Hayes’s tough questioning of Schumer, and (as I will explain below) I was fully expecting to disagree with Schumer.
But Schumer was right. As he said again and again, there were no good choices, only a search for the least-bad option. Surprising even himself while enraging many Democrats, he came to understand that shutting down the government would be terrible for the country—certainly much more terrible than what the supposed satisfaction of standing up to Trump would have wrought.
Why was Schumer right? It is not especially complicated. For the past fourteen years (writing both for myself and sometimes with fellow Verdict columnist Michael Dorf), I have been analyzing Republicans’ serial use of the debt ceiling to take the economy hostage, as they have repeatedly threatened to force the government to default on its obligations. A particularly frustrating aspect of writing those columns derived from the public’s confusion about the difference between a debt ceiling default and a government shutdown.
A debt ceiling default would happen if the existing spending laws, combined with the existing tax laws, resulted in the government’s need to borrow additional funds when the debt ceiling law’s limit had been reached. That is, the problem there would be, if you will, too many laws. This is what Professor Dorf and I dubbed the “trilemma,” where a President would be unable to obey the spending, tax, and debt ceiling laws simultaneously. Three sets of laws would be one too many.
By contrast, a government shutdown happens when there are too few laws. The federal government’s operations are funded by appropriations laws that are passed either annually or, if Congress does not approve spending for the full fiscal year, via a stopgap “continuing resolution” (CR). Annual spending bills or CR’s are the necessary condition for the government to function at all. If no such law is passed before current appropriations expire, the government lacks the legal authority to spend money and thus to operate.
Early last week, as we sped toward a possible shutdown on Friday night, House Republicans passed a truly horrible CR, a set of spending provisions that was bad in any number of ways but especially in giving Trump (and thus Musk) much more discretion over spending than is actually allowed under the Constitution. Every non-Trumpist in the world was right to say that that CR would damage the country.
The question, however, is whether that damage would be worse than not passing the CR and instead letting the government shut down. Faced with that decision, Schumer and a subset of his colleagues voted for the CR and thus against a shutdown. Did they vote for a terrible law? Absolutely, as they were the first to admit. Did they nonetheless make the right choice? Without question.
What would happen if there were “too few” laws, as I put it above? Trump would not be required to do anything. Moreover, because an unrelated set of backup laws allow some core functions of government to continue even during a shutdown, Trump could claim that the government was still functioning, and he could even say that this was exactly the right level at which government should function. “If we can get by without these government functions when there’s a shutdown, who says we need them at all?” he might disingenuously ask.
Note also that the government workers who would be required to work through a shutdown would not be paid. In past shutdowns, the new spending legislation that has restarted the government has always included back pay, not only for those who worked but for those who were involuntarily furloughed, amounting to a forced-but-paid vacation. Does anyone imagine any of that happening under Trump and the current Republican majorities?
Even more fundamentally, as Schumer repeatedly pointed out, Trump and Musk would have no reason even to agree to any legislation to reopen the government—ever—because a President’s discretion is much wider during a shutdown than it is at other times. Trump would love to be in that situation.
Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who disagreed with Schumer about the CR, inadvertently made a telling point when he said in an interview that the Trump administration had lost some court cases in the last few weeks, as judges have struck down Trump’s lawless attempts to dismantle the government. Kaine seemed to think that voting for the CR would amount to an endorsement of lawlessness, but that has it precisely backward, because judges can only rule that Trump has violated a spending law if that spending law exists. Without a CR, there is no law for the courts to enforce.
To be clear, Trump might well be in the final stages of pulling the plug on the rule of law entirely, which would mean that he will not even abide by the requirements of the CR that has now passed (and that he himself signed). If that is where we are headed, however, that would not make Schumer wrong but instead would mean that nothing matters anymore. If Trump is going to spend what he wants, and only what he wants, then Congress will be irrelevant.
In other words, if there is any life left in the rule of law, the CR constrains Trump in ways that a shutdown would not. And as noted above, unlike previous presidents and congresses that have viewed ending a shutdown quickly as essential to good governance, the shutdown that Schumer and his fellow group of Democrats avoided might well have never ended.
And if that had happened, Democrats would have been to blame for handing Trump power that even robust courts could not nullify.
The Understandable Progressive Suspicion of the Schumer Wing of the Democratic Party
Skeptical readers might imagine that I am writing this because I am a big fan of Senator Schumer. Hardly. I am a progressive, which means that I have spent much of my life gnashing my teeth about the feckless and cowardly moves by the Democratic Party’s centrist/corporatist establishment. Time and time again, they have blocked action or undercut policies that were popular and sensible, from the “public option” in the health insurance sphere to expansion of the Supreme Court to repealing regressive tax policies.
On the political front, the leaders who actually run the party—most readily embodied in the public mind by Schumer and House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi—have frustrated many Democrats by undermining truly progressive candidates. Pelosi, for example, strongly backed an anti-abortion Democrat in 2022 instead of a strongly pro-choice and viable alternative in a Texas congressional district, and she and her cohort of old-school Democrats did the same to other progressive candidates.
For what it might be worth, even the House Progressive Caucus hung a true progressive challenger in Ohio out to dry that year, but that was a rare case where some ugly realpolitik came into play. By contrast, the Schumer-Pelosi generation has long frustrated progressives by playing the be-careful-not-to-ask-for-too-much game, which is ultimately based on their belief that the Democrats cannot win by running on popular issues.
I was also among those who were outraged when ten House Democrats voted last week with Republicans to censure Texas’s Al Green for shouting from the floor at Trump during the State of the Union address. Even though reasonable people can disagree about the best ways to respond to Trump, the idea that some Democrats would join with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert to wag their fingers at a fellow Democrat for improper decorum is insane. This is exactly the kind of tone-deafness that makes me wonder why so many Democrats refuse to understand that we are living in a new world of politics that is anything but the world that Schumer (and Joe Biden and others) clearly refuse to let go.
Before the shutdown vote last week, as I was figuring out what was at stake, I was pushed toward a strong presumption against the CR (and therefore in favor of a shutdown) when I heard that Senator John Fetterman had already announced that he would never vote to cause a shutdown. Fetterman has long since burned his once-strong credibility with my fellow progressives, so my rebuttable presumption was that Fetterman’s moral compass was reliably 180 degrees off.
Yet rebuttable presumptions are sometimes rebutted, and in this case, I found myself surprised to end up on Fetterman’s side and, more importantly, happy that Schumer was willing to take the heat for doing the right thing.
Yes, the Non-Trump World Needs to Do Something—Just Not Something Stupid for the Sake of Doing Something
Let me be very clear, however, that I would have had no patience if Schumer’s argument had relied on the tired idea that Democrats must never do anything bold. The progressives and others who are now furious with Schumer are right to want to find a way to take a stand, all the more so because in fact there is very little that Democrats in Washington can do when they are in the minority in both houses of Congress.
When the CR came along, it made intuitive sense (and seemed emotionally satisfying) for Democrats finally to want to play hardball. But their desire to “do something—anything—just do something!” caused too many of them to lose sight of what sinking the CR would have done to what they care about most.
I should also state clearly that, had the argument been entirely about the politics of a shutdown, I would not have been moved. Surely the anti-shutdown side would have argued that Democrats would have been blamed by the public for the shutdown, but so what? The idea that the public in November 2026 would still be voting to punish Democrats for what had happened twenty months is beyond fatuous.
Recall how many times the Republicans during the Biden and Obama administrations pulled off extremely unpopular moves—including shutting the government down (more than once!)—yet ended up in the majority in short order in both houses of Congress. If this were a choice between caution and boldness, I would have welcomed a strong dose of boldness.
Again, however, taking bold action for its own sake is irresponsible. I could try to prove that I can fly by boldly leaping from the balcony of my high-rise apartment building, yet I meekly choose not to do so. Somehow, I am not embarrassed by that.
The Infighting Must Stop
But imagine that I am wrong about everything that I have written above, which would mean that Schumer betrayed everyone by “giving Trump what he wanted” (which, again, is not at all true, no matter what Trump might say publicly) and that everyone in the non-Trump world is fully justified in their anger. The only possible response would be: Get over it! We simply do not have the time or the energy to continue to fight this out among ourselves.
The insta-conventional wisdom on the CR vote has become “Schumer is useless,” even though no one has bothered to address the alternative. Even thoughtful commentators are mostly going with such easy criticisms. On “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” earlier this week, for example, the opening credits showed a picture of Schumer under the words “veni vidi nada,” and Oliver’s opening joke was this: “Chuck Schumer and ten Democrats caved on a resolution to fund the federal government.”
It is worth asking what Oliver and others think Schumer was caving to, because it is not at all obvious why even the most timid of Democrats would see an advantage in caving to Trump. Similarly, a mainstream Democrat claimed that Schumer “missed the moment,” as if there were some option in that moment last week that would have been better for Americans (and thus Democrats). There is a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking happening here, and none of it is dealing in reality.
In any case, it is not only the progressive left that is joining in the pile-on. Oliver’s former boss Jon Stewart (who, like Fetterman, has also squandered his erstwhile status as a progressive icon) predictably got himself into high dudgeon on his Monday evening show. And the NeverTrump conservatives at the Lincoln Project and elsewhere are screaming that Schumer must go “right now” and are happily amplifying reports of a “Schumer revolt.”
There is a self-fulfilling aspect to all of this, in that people who do not understand the stakes are telling other people who do not understand the stakes that Schumer made the wrong call—indeed, not merely the wrong call but a craven and stupid call that amounts to a betrayal of people who want action.
Perhaps Schumer will in fact decide to go away. If so, I will not miss him all that much, for all the reasons that I noted above. But if he is pushed out for having saved everyone from their own uninformed enthusiasms regarding the CR vote, he will at least be able to leave with his head held high.
No matter what happens to any one politician, however, everyone who opposes Trumpism needs to remember who needs to be stopped. Wailing for days on end because the government was not shut down is not going to make the world a better place.