Oh My: Schumer Shutdown Begins Throwing a Wheel or Two?

How much longer will the Schumer Shutdown last? It’s already the second-longest government shutdown in history, and … no one really cares much. Voters seem diffident, Donald Trump seems delighted, and Republicans find themselves on the side of leverage in these stunts for perhaps the first time ever. They have had a clean CR on the Senate floor more than a dozen times, ready to reopen the government as soon as Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats keep filibustering to force the shutdown. 

Finally, one side shows cracks in its façade … and as Axios reports, it’s not Senate Republicans or the White House. Two red-state Democrats flipped to join Republicans on a partial funding bill aimed at paying salaries for the armed forces and critical-mission federal employees:

Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock voted with Republicans on Thursday on the government shutdown, after previously rejecting every GOP measure to re-open the government or fund parts of it.

Why it matters: Their dissents introduce a new challenge for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). He’s keeping his total number of defections low, but the universe of Democrats willing to defy him is expanding.

Ossoff and Warnock, both Georgia Democrats, voted — along with Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) — for a GOP-led bill to pay the military and some other federal workers.

GOP leaders plan to put similar bills on the floor next week, possibly including a measure to pay air traffic controllers through the shutdown.

The pressure of unpaid federal workers falls directly on Schumer and Democrat leadership. That is entirely their constituency, with the exception of military and law-enforcement personnel — and the White House has already moved money around to fund those salaries for the moment. Roll Call separately reports today that Senate Dems are looking to cut side deals on smaller bills for paying federal workers to alleviate this pressure on the Schumer Shutdown, but want language to prevent Trump and Russ Vought from laying off thousands of workers with Vought’s claimed shutdown authority. Republicans balked at that yesterday, although talks are continuing on the payroll-funding options. 

The White House, meanwhile, has taken a shot at congressional privilege. As long as the shutdown continues, they announced yesterday, all requests for access to ICE facilities will be rejected:

The Trump administration has claimed the partial government shutdown also means the end of a requirement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement give congressional access to detention facilities for oversight visits.

The government made the argument in a legal clash with Democratic lawmakers, who had filed a lawsuit against ICE over access to real-time inspections of the facilities and new department guidance that requires at least seven days’ advance notice of a visit.

The lawmakers based that lawsuit on Section 527, a provision included in the fiscal 2024 spending law and applied to funding in the continuing resolution for fiscal 2025, which states that no funds can be used to prevent members or their staffs from entering immigration detention facilities for oversight.

But now the Trump administration says the provision expired on Oct. 1 along with the spending law, and ongoing spending is “not subject to the expired general provision known as Section 527,” according to a notice and declaration from ICE official Ralph Ferguson.

Oopsie! In fairness, the lawsuit started before the shutdown, but Democrats haven’t exactly shown a genius at strategy in the Trump II era. Thanks to that lawsuit, Republicans now know to use that clause as leverage in negotiations, and perhaps might even force an end to it. Courts might not accept this argument in the short run — especially since the administration is still spending money on ICE operations from other sources — and a clean CR would keep it in place. However, the negotiations on the final bill will give Republicans an opportunity to either jettison it from the omnibus, or to get something significant in trade for it. 

At any rate, it appears that Schumer’s squad is losing its taste for shutdown theatrics. The trends on the generic ballot polling aggregate at RCP show why. Even after a trio of Dem-leaning pollsters reported results yesterday, the rolling average shows Democrats at a +2.6, still below the pre-shutdown level of +3.6. The shutdown isn’t helping their midterm prospects at all, and might be actively damaging them — not significantly yet, but the trend is going in the wrong direction. They’re beginning to waver, and for good reason, as it’s become clear that Schumer got led by the nose by progressives into a political box canyon — with no way out but retreat. 

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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