WASHINGTON: Anger was rising in the Democratic ranks Saturday after the party’s top US senator led a band of lawmakers in reluctant support of a Republican measure that prevented a government shutdown.
Congressional passage of the controversial spending bill was being seen as a setback for Democratic backbenchers — and the latest illustration of party leaders’ political impotence in their opposition to President Donald Trump as he takes a wrecking ball to the US federal bureaucracy.
In New York, more than a thousand people protested against Trump’s layoffs, and their anger was no longer directed only at Trump and his chief waste hunter, Elon Musk.
Michelle Vaughan, a 53-year-old artist, carried a sign that read “Elon out! - You too, Chuck!” referring to House Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who supported the bill along with several colleagues.
“The budget was our only leverage,” Vaughan told AFP at the protest in Manhattan. “It was a way to show the base of Democrats and the world that there’s a resistance to this authoritarian takeover.”
The measure slashes billions of dollars from public spending at a time government agencies are already reeling from the dismissal of thousands of civil servants by Trump and Musk.
Despite stark warnings from Democrats, including popular House progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the resolution passed the Senate late Friday with the support of 10 Democrats, including Schumer.
The 74-year-old top Democrat from the state of New York had claimed earlier this week that his camp was united in opposition to the Trump-backed Republican proposal. But on Thursday he relented and declared he would vote to keep the government’s lights on.
Trump signed the bill into law Saturday afternoon.
Schumer justified his position as the least-worst path, and “the best way to minimize the harm that the Trump administration will do to the American people.”
His close Senate ally Dick Durbin agreed.
“With Donald Trump and Elon Musk taking a chainsaw to the federal government’s workforce and illegally freezing federal funding, the last thing we need to do is plunge our country into further chaos and turmoil by shutting down the government,” Durbin said.
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