WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., faces a moment of turmoil after retreating from his initial vow to block a six-month government funding bill written by Republicans, a move that infuriated fellow Democrats in the House and liberal advocates — and raised questions about his effectiveness as party leader in the Senate.
Schumer, who has served as Democrats’ leader in the Senate for eight years, has typically managed to find consensus within his party. But he now finds himself on the defensive in one of the first major legislative fights of the second Trump administration, even drawing rebukes from longtime allies.
In an extraordinary move, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on Senate Democrats to defy him and reject the GOP bill, while continuing to push for a shorter-term bill to keep the government funded ahead of a midnight deadline.
“Democratic senators should listen to the women,” Pelosi said in a statement. “Appropriations leaders Rosa DeLauro and Patty Murray have eloquently presented the case that we must have a better choice: a four-week funding extension to keep [the] government open and negotiate a bipartisan agreement. America has experienced a Trump shutdown before — but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse.”
Highlighting the party’s identity crisis, liberals erupted with anger after Schumer announced Thursday he would vote to advance the GOP bill, with the co-founder of the activist group Indivisible, Ezra Levin, labeling it the “Schumer surrender” and urging Democratic senators to defy him.
“He unilaterally relinquished the biggest point of leverage he has this year. If your strategic analysis ends with you voting for the bill that Mike Johnson, John Thune, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk want, you should rethink your strategy,” Levin told NBC News. “It’s a strategic blunder and tragic mistake. But currently it’s his blunder — I hope he’s alone out there on that ledge. No Democratic senator should follow him.”
Moderate Democrats were also befuddled by the strategy — or lack thereof, as they saw it — from Schumer. They wondered why Schumer threatened to reject the Republicans’ funding bill only to argue that a shutdown was the worst option and would play into President Donald Trump’s hands some 24 hours later. And they noted Trump praised Schumer’s move in a Truth Social post Friday morning.
“When Donald Trump wakes up in the morning and says, ‘You’re doing the right things, Senate Democrats’ — we don’t feel that is the right place to be,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., the No. 3 House Democrat.
“I think the blowback from the base will be severe,” added one Democratic congressional aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Questions over Schumer’s strategy
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who won his race last year in a state Trump carried, told NBC News on Friday that Democrats will “have to do, as a caucus, a postmortem to see how we got to this point and see if we could improve the situation going into the future.”
Pressed specifically about the way Schumer handled the government funding fight this week, Gallego — who reiterated Friday he hopes the bill fails — said that first “we’re going to deal with today’s business at hand.”
“For what happened during the CR — I think we should do a retrospective,” Gallego said, adding that his “concern” with allowing the GOP funding bill to go forward is that Democrats will lose their leverage moving forward.
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., the first Democrat to publicly back the six-month funding bill, said he hasn’t spoken to Schumer or attended the Senate Democratic lunches discussing it.
“You don’t start wars unless you have an exit plan. We had no exit plan,” Fetterman said, warning that a shutdown would give Republicans “the absolute, absolute ability to decide, on their terms, how to reopen it after we shut it down, just to respond to our highly agitated left part of our party.”
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, would not say if Democrats need to discuss a leadership change, saying, “I am focused on doing what I believe is right for my constituents, for our caucus and for our country, and I am a firm no.”
Asked if senators are urging her to run to replace Schumer, Murray said, “No, I am doing my job today the right way I believe I should.”
The non-endorsement of Schumer’s leadership is notable from Murray, who is a Schumer ally. She advocated for a 30-day bill at status quo spending levels to give both parties time to hammer out a larger funding deal, and communicated to Democrats behind closed doors for weeks about the dangers of the House GOP plan.
In a rare move, House Democratic leadership responded to Schumer’s floor speech Thursday with a rebuke.
“House Democrats will not be complicit. We remain strongly opposed to the partisan spending bill under consideration in the Senate,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and his top two deputies said in a joint statement.
Schumer, who is also known for his sharp elbows, defended his decision.
“If we go into a shutdown — and I told my caucus this — there’s no off-ramp. The total off-ramp of a shutdown, how you stop a shutdown, is totally determined by the Republican House and Senate,” Schumer told reporters. “They’ve shown complete blind obeisance by Trump, DOGE, et cetera. They could keep us in a shutdown for months and months and months.”
Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., who is voting against the House-passed bill and is up for re-election next year, said Schumer finds himself in a “difficult spot.”
“These are two horrible options. … [Schumer] did what was right. That’s what a leader does,” Hickenlooper told reporters on Friday. “If you shut down government — I mean, basically, that’s what Trump had been begging to do. That’s what he wants. That’s his ultimate goal, is to shut down as much government as he can. So I think Sen. Schumer is worried about playing right into his hands.”
Democratic divisions on display
As Schumer remained quiet about the House measure earlier this week, members of the Democratic base were urging lawmakers to sink the bill at town halls, through phone calls and on social media. Many saw it as an opportunity to stand up to Trump and Elon Musk after they spent weeks laying off federal workers and dismantling federal agencies.
Many Democrats were clinging to a fallback position that featured the 30-day stopgap bill to negotiate a full funding deal. But House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., made clear he was not interested in negotiating spending bills for this fiscal year, having cut off discussions between the top appropriators the previous week. Trump had told Republicans to dispense with government funding talks so they could move on to his big party-line bill to tackle immigration, taxes and other priorities.
After Johnson released the six-month government funding bill on Saturday, House Democratic leaders notified Schumer of their strategy: unify against it, hold the line and force Republicans back to the negotiating table, according to two sources familiar with the process.
One of the sources said they communicated it to Schumer on Saturday. But they needed Senate Democrats to utilize the 60-vote threshold in the chamber to make it work. And House Democratic leaders were shocked when Schumer declared Thursday wouldn’t block the Republican bill.
“The House Dem plan was communicated to Sen Schumer’s team,” a House Democratic lawmaker, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said over text. “Yes, we are all surprised by Schumer’s acceptance of the GOP CR.”
Many Democrats doubted that Johnson could pass the bill and were caught flat-footed when he muscled it through the House Tuesday on a mostly party-line basis.
Schumer didn’t initiate a full caucus conversation about how to handle the House measure until Democrats met for lunch on Tuesday, according to a source with knowledge of the internal caucus dynamics.
A spokesperson for Schumer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The result was a discombobulated strategy that zig-zagged over the course of three days — sidestepping the issue on Tuesday, vowing to block the bill on Wednesday, then a retreat on Thursday.
“I think there is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told reporters at a House Democratic retreat in Leesburg, Va.. “And this is not just about progressive Democrats. This is across the board. The entire party.”
Hours after his turnaround, Schumer said he expected pushback.
“I knew I’d get criticized,” Schumer said Thursday night on MSNBC. “But I felt obligated for the country, for my Democratic caucus, to the people.”
