I’m trying to bring together the latest information on the funding bill this morning, I have some but not all the morning developments plugged into our cloture tally list. But I wanted to address something closely related but distinct. This has opened up a massive, massive fissure in the Democratic Party, certainly more than anything since the Iraq War vote more than 20 years ago. And I think there’s a good chance it’s bigger, though it’s also true that the overall political situation may evolve and degrade in ways that overshadow it with subsequent events.

I want to share a few thoughts on what happened today in the Senate.

There was a steady drumbeat throughout the day of senators coming out publicly or telling their constituents they not only opposed the House-produced continuing resolution (CR) but would move to block it on the cloture vote. There was an afternoon caucus meeting that was apparently heated and raucous. Sen. Gillibrand led the charge to allow the CR to go through. A shutdown was worse, she insisted. But behind all this Chuck Schumer was really the driver.

24 hours earlier, Schumer went to floor and announced that Republicans didn’t have the votes for cloture. On first glance it appeared his caucus had decided to defy the President and his congressional party. But it was a ploy. He was playing his voters for fools. It soon emerged that Schumer’s plan was to engineer what amounted to a performative stand-down, a choreographed interlude of opposition followed by the passage of the GOP bill. It would go like this: Democrats refused to allow a vote on the GOP bill. They then force a compromise: Dems vote for cloture in exchange for allowing Dems to offer amendments to the House bill. But that was a farce: giving up the Democrats’ one true point of leverage in exchange for votes that were literally certain to fail. (Democrats are in the minority. On a majority vote they lose.) But over the next day Schumer lost control of the situation. Too many people figured out how Schumer’s switcheroo maneuver worked. And too many Senate Democrats didn’t have the stomach for the public opposition to what was happening. That made the initial gambit impossible. So his only choice was to drop the charade and force the matter. Late in the afternoon he went to the Senate floor, not yet 24 hours later, and announced he would vote to give the Republicans their bill.

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D), a 12-term member of Congress from Arizona’s Seventh District, has died, aged 77, from complications from ongoing cancer treatment. He was diagnosed with lung cancer last year.

Here’s my best read of where things stand right now up in the Senate.

There does seem to have been some real movement overnight. A lot of senators held virtual town halls or other meetings where they interacted with voters last night. A number moved over into explicitly saying that they will vote against cloture. That’s a reminder to get straight on terminology.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Senate Democrats’ tactics on House Republicans’ continuing resolution, as well as the tanking stock market and potentially looming recession.

Federal workers obviously don’t like government shutdowns. Most of them are furloughed. Others are forced to continue working without pay. But in a letter addressed to members of the Senate, which I obtained, Everett B. Kelley, head of what I believe is the country’s biggest federal government employee union — the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) — asks senators to vote “no” on the House-produced continuing resolution, and says that a shutdown is actually preferable to passing the bill.

“AFGE is particularly struck that even as the Senate prepares to debate and vote on [the continuing resolution], the Trump administration has announced its intention to effectively destroy the Department of Education regardless of whether Congress approves or disapproves of that decision,” it reads. It also says they categorically reject the idea that voting against the CR means voting for a shutdown. They then go on to discuss that the administration just unilaterally canceled the collective bargaining agreement with TSA workers and declared the agency “union-free.”

In the half-hour or so that I thought Dems were actually going to go to the mat over the continuing resolution, it occurred to me that, if it were up to me, my opening offer would be this: We’ll actually vote for a clean continuing resolution. We’ll even let you have all your DOGE cuts … with one condition. Write up exactly what the end state for each department and agency is. And then we’ll hold a vote for each department. Each department or agency individually. But it’s a bill. And it’s binding. We’ll even give up the right to filibuster. Straight majority votes in both houses. You’re the majority. How can you refuse that? Just put each one to a vote.

As you could see from my comments here and some occasional comments on Bluesky, I felt pretty confident for most of the day that Senate Dems were in the process of caving. Then I had to go offline for a couple hours in the late afternoon. I was a bit stunned and more than pleasantly surprised when I saw clips of Chuck Schumer’s floor speech saying that Senate Dems had the votes to block cloture. Wow, I thought: things were turning out better than I realized. I mean, if you have the votes to block cloture, you block cloture, right? Pretty quickly I heard from multiple sources what was actually happening. This was a deal between Schumer and Thune to allow a brief performative episode to throw Democratic voters off the scent while the Democratic caucus allowed the bill to pass. The deal is this: Democrats agree to give up the 60-vote threshold in exchange for being allowed to offer amendments to the House bill. The “amendment” or “amendments” will likely be some version of Sen. Murray’s 30-day CR. It doesn’t even matter what they are. But this is all for show. Once you give up the 60-vote threshold the whole thing is over.

Senator Kaine put it with great clarity: “Democrats had nothing to do with this bill. And we want an opportunity to get an amendment vote or two. So that’s what we are insisting on to vote for cloture.” Again you’re giving up “cloture,” the 60-vote threshold, in exchange for the ability to offer amendments that will certainly fail.

I feel pretty certain that today is the last day to have any impact on what Democratic senators will do on the upcoming vote on the House-produced “continuing resolution.” There was apparently a pretty intense argument yesterday in a caucus meeting about what to do. (I’ll say more about that shortly). But I think Democratic senators have made a collective decision to keep their constituents in the dark about what they plan to do. That is part of a larger culture of opacity that has seemed to me to be an increasingly consequential part of the failure of civic governance in the country as the drama has played out. If you’re able to get any answers from your senator, please let me know.

Over the last week a few TPM Readers have written in with contrary arguments about how to deal with the “continuing resolution” that just passed the House and will soon be voted on in the Senate. These weren’t critical or acrimonious letters but frank constructive counters, which I appreciate. I wanted to discuss them because they line up pretty closely with the arguments that seem to have strong advocates in the Senate Democratic caucus.

Let me summarize them briefly.