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Dems, Don't Fund the Destruction of US Democracy
Democrats need to hold a nationally televised news conference and announce as a unified group that they won’t fund the federal government if Trump is going to use those dollars to invade blue cities.
Oct 07, 2025
It seemed kind of crazy when the hit movie Civil War came out in spring 2024 and the main storyline hinged on a war against the rest of the United States waged by the combined forces of Texas and California, our two most unalike big states in real life. But it must have ignited one of the dim bulbs in the Donald Trump White House.
On Sunday, the 47th president and his raging id, Stephen Miller—blocked by federal judges and political reality from some of their schemes for flooding cities run by their Democratic enemies with armed soldiers—had a new brainstorm for igniting a constitutional crisis.
First, Trump announced on his favorite platform of Truth Social that—rebuffed by Oregon’s governor and a judge that he’d appointed in his first term—he had a new plan for deploying National Guard troops on the streets of Portland. (This is the city Trump thinks is “on fire” after watching b-roll footage of 2020 unrest on Fox News.)
The administration eventually said it would federalize and call up 200 soldiers from the California National Guard—against the will of that state’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, just as the Trump regime had done earlier this year on the streets of Los Angeles. And it didn’t stop there.
How could voters celebrate a deal that claws back some dollars for healthcare yet continues to pay for state terror on the streets of Chicago or Trump’s pirates of the Caribbean?
By Sunday night, the very pro-Trump governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, sought to cement the bizarre alliance between California and the Lone Star State by announcing that, under a presidential order, he was calling up 400 National Guard troops who could also be sent to Portland, or to Chicago, or anywhere else that the White House seeks to invade.
For all the nattering nabobs in the media who still think this is about “fighting crime,” Trump flew to Norfolk, Virginia, and— before a cheering throng of sailors celebrating the Navy’s 250th anniversary—all but declared war on half of the country he was elected to serve. “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” he declared.
OK, we’ve already crossed the Rubicon more times than an ancient Roman ferry, but this really feels like The Big One in terms of a constitutional crisis. The idea of soldiers from a cornerstone of the old Confederacy rolling up I-55 in BearCat armored personnel carriers to occupy the streets of a northern city really did feel like another Civil War, and this time I’m not talking about the movie.
The president—defying both laws and democratic norms meant to prevent the deployment of American troops on US soil—is sending armed troops to occupy key intersections in the cities that voted heavily for the opposing party, and that’s just the half of it.
As the calendar flipped from summer to fall, the Trump regime has amped up the authoritarianism on every front—a flash-bang dead-of-night warrantless raid on an entire Chicago apartment building, obliterating boats and their passengers off the coast of Venezuela in a campaign that the normally staid New York Bar Association just called “murder,” and pressing prosecutors to indict Trump’s political enemies.
Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, in the crosshairs with masked federal agents already swarming his state’s largest city, has risen to the occasion—at least verbally.
“There is no reason a President should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, or cooperation,” Pritzker wrote on Bluesky Sunday night, adding: “The brave men and women who serve in our national guards must not be used as political props. This is a moment where every American must speak up and help stop this madness.”
While Democrats have more often been finding the right words about America’s rising fascism, action has proved more complicated. Pritzker himself came in for criticism over the role of Illinois State Police at the Broadview Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Chicago, where protesters believed the troopers were curbing their protest rights. Time and time again, a repressive US policing culture seems to trump the ability of even progressive Democrats to rein it in.
American fascism is here, and the battle must be joined.
Even worse, the Democrats have powerful leverage that they’re not using. Some 1,000 miles east of the democracy crisis in Chicago, the 47 Democratic senators—thanks to the filibuster—have been using their power to keep much of the federal government shut down, after missing last week’s deadline for legislation to keep paying the bills.
Led by a duo of milquetoast New Yorkers, Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats and their omnipresent pollsters have said they won’t vote to reopen the government unless Trump and the GOP agree to undo devastating cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
The Dems are right to fight this battle—millions of working-class people face devastating premium hikes, or will lose coverage altogether if nothing is done—and yet it also fails to reflect the gravity of the current threat to the American way of life. How could voters celebrate a deal that claws back some dollars for healthcare yet continues to pay for state terror on the streets of Chicago or Trump’s pirates of the Caribbean?
We heard last week from one prominent Democrat who gets it. “Listen, I don’t think we’re asking for too much in that we are telling the president that if you want us to sign onto a budget, it can’t be a budget that funds the destruction of our democracy,“ Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told the New Republic last week. ”I would be a sucker to agree to a budget that literally funds an operation to hunt me and my allies down—to imprison us, harass us, intimidate us."
A steadily rising number of everyday voters also see the rise of authoritarianism as intolerable. One of the more telling developments of 2025 has been watching regular citizens increasingly defy the government—members of grand juries or trial juries rejecting the Justice Department’s extreme prosecutions, for example—while pampered elites curry favor with the regime. The budget shutdown crisis in Washington is an opportunity for top Democrats to flip the script.
It’s time for the opposition party to take a bold, principled risk. Democrats need to hold a nationally televised news conference and announce as a unified group that they won’t fund the federal government if Trump is going to use those dollars to invade blue cities. They need to declare: No troops, now or in the future, or no deal.
American fascism is here, and the battle must be joined. Democratic leaders need to rally their own “troops”—millions of angry and anxious citizens—to take to the streets in support of the fight to save democracy and to accept the sacrifices that come with making a moral stand against autocracy. They also need to gamble that courage will enhance their political careers, even if that risks losing reelection to a job that their past cowardice has made nearly worthless anyway.
The choice is clear. We can resist Trump’s tyranny at some unknown future date—when his tin soldiers are stationed across the country, when the media has been totally neutered and other institutions like our universities have been humiliated and crushed, and when the odds for success will be extremely difficult. Or we can stage that battle now, mustering all the liberty we have left. Democrats simply cannot pass a budget that pays for the destruction of the American Experiment.
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This Government Shutdown Is Not Normal
Democrats finally have some bargaining leverage. They should use it.
Oct 03, 2025
I’ve been directly involved in government shutdowns, one when I was secretary of labor. It’s hard for me to describe the fear, frustration, and chaos that ensued. I recall spending the first day consoling employees—many in tears as they headed out the door.
In some ways, this shutdown is similar to others. Agencies and departments designed to protect consumers, workers, and investors are now officially closed, as are national parks and museums.
Most federal workers are not being paid—as many as 750,000 could be furloughed—including those who are required to remain on the job, like air-traffic controllers or members of the US military.
So-called “mandatory” spending, including Social Security and Medicare payments, are continuing, although checks could be delayed. (President Donald Trump has made sure that construction of his new White House ballroom won’t be affected.)
Were Democrats to vote to keep the government going, what guarantee do they have that Trump will in fact keep the government going?
There have been eight shutdowns since 1990. Trump has now presided over four.
But this shutdown—the one that began Wednesday morning—is radically different.
For one thing, it’s the consequence of a decision made in July by Trump and Senate Republicans to pass Trump’s gigantic “big beautiful bill” (I prefer to call it “big ugly bill”) without any Democratic votes.
They could do that because of an arcane Senate procedure called “reconciliation,” which allowed the big ugly to get through the Senate with just 51 votes rather than the normal 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster.
The final tally was a squeaker. All Senate Democrats opposed the legislation. When three Senate Republicans joined them, Vice President JD Vance was called in to break a tie. Some Republicans bragged that they didn’t need a single Democrat.
The big ugly fundamentally altered the priorities of the United States government. It cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act—with the result that health insurance premiums for tens of millions of Americans will soar starting in January.
The big ugly also cut nutrition assistance and environmental protection, while bulking up immigration enforcement and cutting the taxes of wealthy Americans and big corporations.
Trump and Senate Republicans didn’t need a single Democrat then. But this time, Republicans couldn’t use the arcane reconciliation process to pass a bill to keep the governing going.
Now they needed Senate Democratic votes.
Yet keeping the government going meant keeping all the priorities included in the big ugly bill that all Senate Democrats opposed.
Which is why Senate Democrats refused to sign on unless most of the big ugly’s cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act were restored, so health insurance premiums won’t soar next year.
Even if Senate Democrats had gotten that concession, the Republican bill to keep the government going would retain all the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations contained in the big ugly, along with all the cuts in nutrition assistance, and all the increased funding for immigration enforcement.
There’s a deeper irony here.
As a practical matter, the US government has been “shut down” for over eight months, since Trump took office a second time.
Trump and the sycophants surrounding him—such as Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and, before him, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficnecy—have had no compunctions about shutting down parts of the government they don’t like—such as US Agency for International Development.
They’ve also fired, laid off, furloughed, or extended buyouts to hundreds of thousands of federal employees doing work they don’t value, such as at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (The federal government is already expected to employ 300,000 fewer workers by December than it did last January.)
They’ve impounded appropriations from Congress for activities they oppose, ranging across the entire federal government.
Wednesday, on the first day of the shutdown, Vought announced that the administration was freezing some $26 billion in funds Congress had appropriated—including $18 billion for New York City infrastructure (home to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries) and $8 billion for environmental projects in 16 states, mostly led by Democrats.
All of this is illegal—it violates the Impoundment Control Act of 1974—but it seems unlikely that courts will act soon enough to prevent the regime from harming vast numbers of Americans.
Vought is also initiating another round of mass layoffs targeting, in his words, “a lot” of government workers.
This is being described by Republicans as “payback” for the Democrats not voting to keep the government going, but evidently nothing stopped Vought from doing mass layoffs and freezing Congress’ appropriations before the shutdown.
In fact, the eagerness of Trump and his lapdogs over the last eight months to disregard the will of Congress and close whatever they want of the government offers another reason why Democrats shouldn’t cave in.
Were Democrats to vote to keep the government going, what guarantee do they have that Trump will in fact keep the government going?
Democrats finally have some bargaining leverage. They should use it.
If tens of millions of Americans lose their health insurance starting in January because they can no longer afford to pay sky-high premiums, Trump and his Republicans will be blamed. Months before the midterms.
It would be Trump’s and his Republicans’ fault anyway—it’s part of their big ugly bill—but this way, in the fight over whether to reopen the government, Americans will have a chance to see Democrats standing up for them.
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Has Sen Schumer Learned Costly Lessons in the Federal Spending Fight?
With very few opportunities for the minority party to make a difference, Schumer and Senate Democrats now must hold strong to stand up for everyday Americans and their access to the most basic essentials.
Sep 26, 2025
In March, Food & Water Watch joined a chorus of organizations calling on New York Sen. Chuck Schumer to step aside as Democratic minority leader after his disastrous capitulation during the last federal appropriations fight. At the time, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk were running rampant, defunding and destroying critical climate, food, and water programs. But instead of fighting to mitigate the harms, Schumer led fellow Senate Democrats in ceding any leverage they had by capitulating to Republicans’ six-month spending bill without demanding any concessions or procedural backstops.
Now the opportunity has returned to leverage the significant power Senate Democrats have ahead of the latest spending deadline. For the moment it seems that Schumer has learned some lessons from the earlier debacle. He led his caucus to reject a House spending proposal and support an alternative plan to protect critical food, water, and health programs from Trump’s dangerous cuts. He must continue to demonstrate this leadership as the September 30 spending deadline draws near.
Trump and congressional Republicans are playing a dangerous game of chicken, running headfirst into a government shutdown on October 1 with no off-ramp. Trump has refused to even meet with Democratic leadership, and House Republicans are refusing to come back to work until after the funding deadline. They are following the same playbook they used in March to force the hands of Schumer and Senate Democrats. It worked then, and it will work again if Schumer doesn’t stand strong.
After all, the stakes couldn’t be higher: Access to safe, affordable food, clean water, basic healthcare, and so much more.
A Democratic counter proposal from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) includes a key protection against partisan rescissions. We are encouraged that Schumer claims to support this plan.
Though congressional Republicans tout their spending bill as a “clean” extension of current funding levels, this commitment is belied by their threatened use of partisan rescissions to enact Trump’s dangerous cuts later on. This backdoor process fast-tracks the elimination of previously agreed upon funding. While the spending bill needs the support of Senate Democrats to reach the 60-vote threshold to avoid the filibuster, with partisan rescissions Trump can later send Congress a list of programs to eliminate through a simple majority vote—without requiring any Democratic support.
Case in point: Congressional Republicans slashed funding for public television and radio—long an aim of the right—through this partisan rescission process earlier in the year. Trump has further abused this tool to illegally withhold funding through a so-called “pocket rescission,” issuing a last-minute request to freeze funds, run out the clock on the fiscal year, and unilaterally cut congressionally-approved funds. This is unconstitutional.
Further backdoor cuts threaten everything from the environment to education to healthcare. On clean water specifically, Trump and congressional Republicans have proposed slashing funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, which sets limits on contaminants in water, develops methods to test for and removes toxic substances, and establishes regulations that prevent water pollution in the first place. Slashing the EPA will imperil the ability of regulators to enforce clean water standards, making our water less safe and Americans more sick.
Republicans have also proposed slashing funding for water infrastructure. In fact, Trump’s spending proposal calls for virtually eliminating funding for the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds—the primary source of federal funding for water infrastructure in the country. Our water infrastructure is already dramatically underfunded. Federal cuts will make it even more difficult for municipalities to respond to acute threats to water safety, including toxic PFAS “forever chemicals,” lead, and climate change-induced storms and flooding. The result will be higher water bills for households and business, and dirtier, dangerous water.
Senate Democrats must reject the House spending bill for these and many other reasons. Fortunately, a Democratic counter proposal from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) includes a key protection against partisan rescissions. We are encouraged that Schumer claims to support this plan.
Recently we facilitated a letter from more than 200 groups across the country that was sent to Sen. Schumer, demanding just this. The letter was signed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Oxfam America, Popular Democracy, and Public Citizen, among many others. It seems that Sen. Schumer is finally listening.
With very few opportunities for the minority party to make a difference, Schumer and Senate Democrats now must hold strong to stand up for everyday Americans and their access to the most basic essentials, including clean water. No budget deal that allows for future partisan rescissions can be allowed to pass.
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