I Hate to Burst Your Bubble, But Chuck Schumer Isn’t the Problem
- Tyler Steffy
- Mar 23
- 4 min read
To prevent a government shutdown earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and nine other spineless senators cowardly bent the knee to Republicans by handing over whatever was left of their congressional leverage for absolutely nothing in return. Thanks to them, from now until the end of Fiscal Year 2025, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have free rein for their agenda.
Democrats are outraged, and grassroots movements are mobilizing to oust Schumer and primary all 10 senators. That’s the least they deserve. But in all the anger, activism, and congressional meddling, my fellow Democrats are missing the real point.
The same tired story happens every few months when America plays its game of political chicken. The government barrels toward shutdown, Congress scrambles to pass a temporary fix, and we the people watch in exhausted frustration. The problem isn’t who won or lost the fight, it’s that the fight exists.
In the vast majority of countries, a failed budget simply means the previous year's funding carries over until a new one passes. This means that even the most extreme situations do not affect citizen well-being.
In 2017, Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuiness resigned. The Sinn Féin party refused to replace him, and the executive branch subsequently dissolved. The legislative assembly did not convene for three years until the British government intervened. In all the chaos, people never lost their services. If the United States Congress did not convene for three years, our entire government and the global economy would collapse.
The United States is an outlier. We are the only advanced democracy in the world that shuts down its own government over routine budget disputes. In most parliamentary systems such as Canada and the United Kingdom, failure to pass a national budget triggers elections. The result? A system that holds elected officials accountable without a wholesale shutdown of public services and government paychecks.
We’ve normalized the abnormal idea that our government can simply stop functioning if Congress doesn’t get its act together. And worse, we’ve allowed shutdowns to become a standard political weapon rather than the catastrophic failures they are.
What’s even more frustrating is that government shutdowns weren’t common for nearly the first two centuries of our country. The Constitution itself says nothing about them. In fact, before 1980, when Congress failed to pass a budget on time, the government did function like other democracies and simply kept running under the assumption that approval would happen eventually.
That all changed thanks to a little-known legal opinion issued by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, who interpreted the Antideficiency Act to mean that if Congress doesn’t appropriate funds, the government must close. Civiletti’s ruling effectively created the modern government shutdown and a new weapon in the American political landscape.
The fallout is disastrous. Since the 1980s, funding gaps caused the government to follow full shutdown procedures 10 times, with the longest lasting 34 days from 2018 to 2019 under President Trump's first term. In every one, the U.S. economy loses billions of dollars, and federal workers—who have nothing to do with partisan fights in Congress—go unpaid.
Let’s be clear: both parties contribute to government shutdowns. But Republicans, particularly in the modern era, have made shutdown threats a core piece in their extreme political strategy of cutting spending at the expense of American workers.
The result is a perverse incentive system where Republicans get rewarded for shutting down the government while Democrats, fearing public backlash, scramble to keep it open at any cost. And that brings us back to Schumer and his betrayal.
Yes, Schumer and his colleagues caved. No, it wasn’t a good look. But let’s not pretend that primarying 10 Senate Democrats is going to fix the problem. As long as shutdowns remain a viable political strategy, majority parties will continue using them to extract policy wins, and the opposition will continue struggling with impossible choices.
So instead of playing the same old blame game, we should be asking: why do shutdowns exist at all? And more importantly, how do we get rid of them?
If we truly want to stop the cycle and create a Democratic Party fully capable of opposing Trump’s agenda without threatening workers, there are concrete steps we should fight for.
We need automatic funding extensions, and many states already have this rule. If lawmakers fail to pass a budget, the previous year’s funding levels simply remain in place. Congress could ensure that even in gridlock, the government keeps running.
And our representatives need an incentive. While federal workers don’t get paid during shutdowns, members of Congress do. That’s absurd. If lawmakers had to experience the same economic pain as government employees, they’d be far less likely to let shutdowns happen in the first place. If a government shutdown continues to mean gutting the federal workforce, then Congress needs to lose their paycheck too.
Or if we’re feeling ambitious, we could amend the Constitution and adopt the same rules of other countries. If Congress fails to pass a budget, we could force every member of Congress to resign and start again with special elections for a legislature of functional representatives. It’s certainly out of the ordinary, but such amendments are occasionally proposed.
Either way, it’s time to stop accepting dysfunction. We’re trained to view our government treating itself like a ransom victim as normal, but it’s not. Government shutdowns are a uniquely American failure created by bad legal interpretation and exacerbated by bad faith actors.
If we want to break this cycle, we need to stop focusing on who “won” the latest funding fight and start demanding systemic reform. To my fellow Democrats, the real crisis isn’t that Chuck Schumer caved, or that the Republican Party held the government hostage. It’s why we allowed them to kidnap our government in the first place.
Sources:
[2]-https://www.newsweek.com/over-15k-sign-democrat-petition-against-chuck-schumer-enough-enough-2045421
Photo Credit:
[Header]: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
[Embedded 1]: Jacquelyn Martin | AP Photo
[Embedded 2]: Getty Images via CNN Newsroom
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