Since the 1990s, threats to shut down the federal government have come almost entirely from congressional Republicans. Time and again, House Democrats have provided the votes needed to avert a shutdown crisis. But on Tuesday that script flipped, and only one Democrat voted for the short-term funding bill that would prevent the government from closing at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. Every other Democrat voted against it.
Contrary to what House Republicans insisted while defending the 99-page bill, which passed by a vote of 217-213, the measure isn’t by any means a simple resolution to keep the government open. Instead, the bill manages to give away Congress’ power to President Donald Trump both explicitly and implicitly, throwing the balance of powers even further out of whack. Even if it means prompting a shutdown, Senate Democrats should hold the line against its becoming law.
Even if it means prompting a shutdown, Senate Democrats should hold the line against its becoming law.
In an appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” this month, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., called for a short-term bill “to freeze funding at current levels, to make sure that the government can stay open while we begin to incorporate all these savings that we’re finding through the DOGE effort and these other sources of revenue that President Trump’s policies are bringing to the table.” Johnson packed a lot of misdirection into that statement, including implying that the bill up for debate would, as most continuing resolutions do, simply preserve the status quo.
It’s true that the GOP bill would fund the federal government through the end of September with about the same amount of overall spending as in the previous fiscal year’s appropriations. All told, there’s a dip of about $7 billion in the total, but even that topline number doesn’t fully explain how this bill fails to be what legislators call a “clean CR.”
Rather than keep spending level across, the bill would reduce funding for nonmilitary spending by billions while boosting spending for defense spending and border enforcement. The legislation would slash more than $1.4 billion from programs in the departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services. Another $560 million would be stripped from the departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, while $1.42 billion would be added to the Department of Homeland Security’s budget.
Troublingly, Republicans also inserted language into the special rule that set up Tuesday’s vote. Entirely violating the laws of physics, as Congress often does in figuring out what counts as a “day,” the rule states that “each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act … with respect to a joint resolution terminating” the supposed economic emergency Trump announced in February. It’s that order that allows him to keep yo-yoing over tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and in effect the GOP is giving up the ability to turn off that power.
As unfortunate as all those provisions are, that wasn’t the line in the sand for House Democrats. Instead, they objected to the Republicans’ refusal to include language that would explicitly require Trump to spend the funds that Congress has passed in the short-term bill. Such language shouldn’t be necessary, as the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 bars presidents from withholding funding that Congress has appropriated because they disagree about the policy.
The Trump administration has been clear that it considers the Impoundment Control Act unconstitutional and hasn’t been subtle in the ways it has tried to challenge it. Democrats, legal experts and advocates have accused billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency of outright violating the law with their spending cuts even as the contracts they’ve canceled have shown negligible savings. The Office of Management and Budget rescinded its total funding freeze order — that was the most direct challenge to Congress’ spending power — but even so, it ordered agency heads to continue to root out programs that the White House feels should be choked of funding.
Pushing members to publicly support a bill the White House promises not to follow is a gross bait-and-switch that transforms appropriations from law into mere guidance. In trying to rally archconservative House Republicans, who normally are loath to support continuing resolutions, Vice President JD Vance reportedly told members that the White House would simply not follow the bill’s spending instructions. Doing so would also give swing-district GOP members a chance to foist any blame for pain from those illegal spending cuts on the White House. In the end, through a major push involving calls from Trump himself, only one House Republican ended up voting against passing the bill. Pushing members of Congress to publicly support a bill the White House promises not to follow is a gross bait-and-switch that transforms appropriations from law into mere guidance. Democrats want to forestall that with a provision that asserts the power of the purse in a way that would make it hard for courts that hear lawsuits over DOGE’s cuts to ignore. That may sound like wishful thinking, but as legal analyst Chris Geidner has noted, the White House hasn’t blatantly ignored the courts yet. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who has written several opinions that urge clearer legislative instructions for the executive, would be hard-pressed to find a reason to side with Trump against such specific language from Congress. The GOP has set a trap for Senate Democrats, as New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore put it: vote for a continuing resolution they don’t like or be blamed by Republicans (hypocritically so) for causing a government shutdown. NBC News reported Tuesday that several moderate Democratic senators were watching the House vote to see whether they have any political cover to vote in favor of the short-term bill. But despite being taunted and mocked by Republicans who accused them of supporting a shutdown, House Democrats remained united, save one crossover vote from conservative Democrat Dan Golden of Maine. It’s now up to Senate Democrats to hold the line and oppose the GOP’s turning the Treasury into a slush fund for the Trump administration. I don’t advocate for a filibuster lightly. But with the Constitution under attack, Democrats should use it as a weapon. And they should explain to the American people that, as the Constitution makes clear, the decision on how to spend their tax dollars should remain with the Congress they’ve elected, not with the president and certainly not with an unelected and uninformed billionaire-turned-bureaucrat looking for things to destroy.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
