I want to share a few thoughts on what happened today in the Senate.
There was a steady drumbeat throughout the day of Senators coming out publicly or telling their constituents they not only opposed the House-produced continuing resolution (CR) but would move to block it on the cloture vote. There was an afternoon caucus meeting that was apparently heated and raucous. Sen. Gillibrand led the charge to allow the CR to go through. A shutdown was worse, she insisted. But behind all this Chuck Schumer was really the driver.
24 hours earlier Schumer went to floor and announced that Republicans didn’t have the votes for cloture. On first glance it appeared his caucus had decided to defy the President and his congressional party. But it was a ploy. He was playing his voters for fools. It soon emerged that Schumer plan was to engineer what amounted to a performative stand-down, a choreographed interlude of opposition followed by the passage of the GOP bill. It would go like this: Democrats refused to allow a vote on the GOP bill. They then force a compromise: Dems vote for cloture in exchange for allowing Dems to offer amendments to the House bill. But that was a farce: giving up the Democrats’ one true point of leverage in exchange for votes that were literally certain to fail (Democrats are in the minority. On a majority vote they lose.) But over the next day Schumer lost control of the situation. Too many people figured out how Schumer’s switcheroo maneuver worked. And too many Senate Democrats didn’t have the stomach for the public opposition to what was happening. That made the initial gambit impossible. So his only choice was to drop the charade and force the matter. Late in the afternoon he went to the senate floor, not yet twenty-four hours later, and announced he would vote to give the Republicans their bill.
