In this edition: the high-stakes Wisconsin Supreme Court fight, the aging Democrats firing up their grassroots, and Maryland Governor Wes Moore on life under DOGE.
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The Democrats’ Tea Party was born on Thursday night, when Chuck Schumer took the Senate floor to announce his grudging vote for a Republican spending bill. In the Capitol, senators from states far redder than Schumer’s announced that they would not follow their leader. Forty miles away, at their retreat in the DC exurbs,
House Democrats who had overwhelmingly opposed the bill vented about Schumer’s weakness.
“There is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters at the retreat. And there was, along with amazement that the party’s strategy to stop the continuing resolution was so outdated.
That strategy relied on a rump of House conservatives refusing to vote for it. They expected this because a rump of House conservatives had always refused to vote for spending packages. What Democrats didn’t appreciate was that the key conservatives, who’d given up on getting real spending cuts through the Article III obstacle course, were very happy to outsource that to Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
“This continuing resolution is going to continue spending, but those checks aren’t going to be cut,” North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson told Fox News on Sunday. “We’re going to claw back that spending, places where DOGE has identified that it’s wasteful.”
The idea of climbing over the most ambitious people in an 800,000-person district to hand your power to the president is baffling to many Democrats. This is a party that’s down two members, two months into the year, because Texas’s Sylvester Turner and Arizona’s Raúl Grijalva ran for full terms after fatal cancer diagnoses. Democrats get elected to be in the room and move resources back to their districts. They rarely get everything they want, but they can pack enough into must-pass bills that the grind is worth it.
DOGE had changed that. Congressional Democrats watched helplessly as the new administration fired government workers and slashed agencies that they had all agreed to fund. The legal arm of the resistance
slowed some of this down; the administration blamed that on “activist judges” and plowed ahead. Would the Supreme Court uphold the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and reverse this? Why wait to find out? “I would never support this language, but I do trust Donald Trump,” Missouri Rep. Eric Burlison
told NOTUS this week.
Burlison only got to DC two years ago. He missed the Obama-era battles that made Republicans bolder when they saw the executive branch
do what Congress wouldn’t, like giving legal status to illegal immigrants after every reform bill foundered. Ocasio-Cortez arrived here two years into the Trump presidency, during a shutdown triggered by his refusal to fund the government without border wall money. Days into her first term, she
watched Trump declare an emergency to get billions of dollars in wall funding anyway.
What president is going to take office and give up the powers that Congress and courts keep handing him? Joe Biden didn’t do it.
For Democrats, the legacy of Schumer’s defeat may be a future majority ditching the legislative filibuster — a looming issue if Ocasio-Cortez runs for Schumer’s seat in 2028. Three years ago, when two moderate Democrats stopped a run at the filibuster, Mitch McConnell warned their party about what Republicans would do without it: Pass “all kinds of conservative policies with zero input from the other side.” That’s exactly what happened with the continuing resolution.
