Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday that Democrats won't provide enough support to pass a government funding bill that Republicans wrote and passed through the House, leaving it uncertain whether Congress can avert a shutdown before Friday night's deadline.
Schumer's comments come one day after the House narrowly approved a continuing resolution to keep the government funded through the end of September.
“Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort but Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input — any input — from congressional Democrats. Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR,” Schumer said on the floor, calling for a one-month funding bill that provides more time to negotiate a deal.
“Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11 CR that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass," he said. ""I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday."
His remarks came after a lunch meeting between Democratic senators on Wednesday. They went in torn on whether to vote for the House's six-month measure, with some worried that a shutdown would be worse, even as they widely disapprove of the House bill.
The government will shut down at the end of Friday, March 14, without a new funding law signed by President Donald Trump, who has endorsed the House legislation. Republicans control 53 Senate seats and need 60 votes to defeat a filibuster.
“There are not the votes right now to pass it,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told reporters after the meeting. “Democrats had nothing to do with this bill. And we want an opportunity to get an amendment vote or two. And so that’s what we are insisting on.”
Still, some Democrats fear that a shutdown would be worse than accepting the bill, even though they didn't have input on crafting it.
“Quite frankly, both outcomes are bad,” Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., told reporters on Wednesday. “Elections have consequences, but this is an extreme bill. If it passes, it will hurt a lot of ordinary people on the ground. If the government shuts down, that will hurt a lot of ordinary people on the ground, and so that, that is the dilemma in which we found ourselves.”
“Additionally, the problem I have with the bill is that I think it advances this project that we’re seeing come from the executive branch, this power grab that does not respect that the power of the purse is with the Congress,” he said.
Outside the room where Democrats held their lunch meeting, reporters could hear senators loudly making their point to their colleagues inside, as the party attempted to solve for a problem with two outcomes they aren’t interested in.
“I’m weighing the badness of each option,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who didn’t take a position on the bill.
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., has said he will support the stopgap funding bill because it is preferable to a government shutdown.
Many Senate Democrats said they want a one-month bill to finish work on a new appropriations agreement. Others said they disapprove of the House bill's boost to military spending and the cuts to nondefense domestic programs. And still others say they want guardrails on Trump's Elon Musk's powers to dismantle the government without congressional approval.
Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., said Democrats “are unified in not wanting to shut down the government, and what we need to do is vote on the short-term” bill for one month.
But Republicans have little appetite for the one-month measure and are resigned to a continuing resolution through the fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. The White House has pressured the party to get this issue off their plate so their can focus on a multitrillion-dollar, Republican-only bill to advance Trump's legislative agenda on the border, taxes and other policy areas.
The six-month government funding measure was passed by House Republicans on a nearly party-line vote of 217-213. And with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., as a firm no, at least eight Democrats will be needed to break a filibuster in the Senate.
Some Democratic senators and aides worry that supporting the bill would set a bad precedent — they would effectively be telling House Republicans that they can write government funding measures without Democrats at the negotiating table.
"That's also one of the issues with what we're faced here," Kelly said.
Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., slammed House Republicans for cutting Democrats out of the process on the bill.
"House Republicans right now have demonstrated that they don't care about working with anyone for the good of the American people," he said. "They're going to continue marching along those lines."
Time is quickly running out. The Senate cannot vote on any bill by the Friday midnight deadline unless all 100 senators agree to skip the hurdles.
“At least for now, I don’t see the votes. Based on my reading of the end of the meeting, I don’t see the votes there right now for passing the House Republican” bill Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told reporters on Wednesday.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said he doesn't support a 30-day funding bill and wants to pass the House's six-month measure.
"I’m hoping that we’ll have a requisite number of Democrats in order to do that," he said Tuesday. "And I think anything else they put out there is a smoke screen, because at this point, there’s really one solution on the table that keeps the government funded."
Republicans are betting that Democrats won't have the appetite to allow a shutdown despite their disagreements with the House bill.
Lujan maintained that Democrats won’t be responsible for a shutdown if the legislation falls short.
“Republicans are in charge of the Senate, in charge of the House, and have the White House. The American people know who’s in charge,” he said. “It’s ridiculous for Republicans to try to blame the party that’s the minority everywhere.”
Meanwhile, at their retreat in Leesburg, Va., House Democrats urged their Senate colleagues to block the bill. All but one, Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, voted against the funding bill on Tuesday.
"We’re asking Senate Democrats to vote no on this continuing resolution, which is not clean, and it makes cuts across the board," Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said. "And it’s going to be one of those things where people are going to look at this vote and every bad thing that now happens with Doge and Donald Trump, Elon Musk, you can go back to this vote. So we’re asking the Senate Democrats to vote no."
NBC News' Kate Santaliz, Gabriel Vasconcellos and Scott Wong contributed.
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