How much longer will the Schumer Shutdown drag on? It’s already the second-longest in U.S. history — and the public’s reaction is basically a shrug. Voters don’t seem to care, Donald Trump looks downright pleased, and for once, Republicans actually hold the upper hand in one of these high-stakes budget showdowns.
They’ve put a clean continuing resolution on the Senate floor more than a dozen times, ready to reopen the government immediately. The only obstacle? Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats, who keep filibustering to prolong the shutdown they created.
At last, there are cracks forming in the shutdown standoff — and it’s not on the Republican side. As Axios reports, the first signs of defection are coming from the Democrats.
Two red-state Democrats broke ranks and joined Republicans in supporting a partial funding bill to ensure the military and other critical federal employees get paid. It’s a clear sign that Schumer’s iron grip is slipping:
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 mounting pressure from unpaid federal workers is landing squarely on Schumer and Democratic leadership. After all, that’s their base — outside of the military and law enforcement, whose salaries the White House has already temporarily covered by reallocating funds.
According to Roll Call, Senate Democrats are now scrambling to cut side deals on smaller funding bills to pay federal employees and relieve some of the political heat from the Schumer Shutdown. But, true to form, they’re also trying to slip in language blocking President Trump and Budget Director Russ Vought from exercising shutdown authority to lay off thousands of bureaucrats.
Republicans rightly balked at the idea, seeing it as a blatant attempt to protect the bloated federal workforce. Negotiations on the payroll bills are ongoing, but for now, the political pressure remains firmly on Schumer and his party.
The White House, meanwhile, just took direct aim at congressional privilege. In a bold move, officials announced that as long as the shutdown drags on, all requests from members of Congress to visit ICE facilities will be denied:
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.
Yikes…
To be fair, the Democrats’ lawsuit technically predated the shutdown — but strategy has never been their strong suit in the Trump II era. Thanks to that legal misfire, Republicans now have a powerful piece of leverage in negotiations and could use it to either end the clause entirely or extract major concessions.
Sure, the courts may not side with the GOP right away, especially since the administration is still funding ICE through alternative channels, and a clean continuing resolution would keep the status quo intact. But when final negotiations on the omnibus begin, Republicans will have a golden opportunity — either strip out the clause altogether or demand something meaningful in return.
Meanwhile, it’s becoming clear that Schumer’s team is losing its appetite for shutdown theater. The numbers tell the story: even after a fresh batch of Democrat-friendly polls dropped, the RealClearPolitics average still shows Democrats down to +2.6 on the generic ballot — a full point below their pre-shutdown standing of +3.6. The stunt isn’t helping their midterm prospects at all — if anything, it’s starting to hurt them.
