I said like a week ago that I’m pretty confident the GOP is going to get wrecked in the 2026 midterms. You have to imagine a lot of very improbable things happening to imagine anything else. I’m hearing from many readers questioning whether Democrats will show up after this performance. I think they will, though I think there’s a good chance a number of senators will draw primary challengers, and it would be a good thing if they lose so long as they’re in solidly blue states. But we greatly overestimate the impact of enthusiasm and disappointment measured in these terms. Midterm backlashes come from responses far more organic in the population at large. And they’re often as much against their own party’s leadership as against the incumbent party. I see this not only as a misfire and failure to at least take a chance on preserving some of the machinery of the embattled republic. It was also a missed political opportunity. And here I mean politics not simply through the prism of the 2026 election.

This speaks for itself. From NBC News …

WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance acknowledged Friday that Elon Musk has made “mistakes” while executing mass firings of federal employees and emphasized that he believes there are “a lot of good people who work in the government.”

“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake. I’m accepting of mistakes,” Vance said in an interview with NBC News.

“I also think you have to quickly correct those mistakes. But I’m also very aware of the fact that there are a lot of good people who work in the government — a lot of people who are doing a very good job. And we want to try to preserve as much of what works in government as possible, while eliminating what doesn’t work.”

It’s hard to write clearly when you’re being flooded with new information. But here goes. I’ve heard people arguing the “‘yes’ on cloture” argument, essentially saying, “don’t assume you can shut DOGE down, undo the damage. It’s not a silver bullet.” I can only speak for myself, but if anyone is thinking, based on the arguments I’ve made, that blocking cloture is a silver bullet and if Democrats just do this we can shut this whole thing down, I haven’t been clear. I will further say that while the things I’ve written over the last week or so make it pretty clear where I stand on this, I have several times had a hard think with myself: are you sure you’re right about this? I’m not sure I’d say this is a close call. But it’s a hard call, for me at least. Both options hold out possibilities of calamity and destruction I’ve never seriously contemplated before. That is simply where we are. I wish we weren’t here. But we are here.

As I’ve written, my ask would be, right out of the gate, “we’ll give you the keys, we’ll give you your bill, if we write down the DOGE plan for each department and agency. And we just do an up or down vote. If you can pass it through Congress, that’s all we ask.” (I’ve explained previously why I think this is a good idea.)

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.