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.