Schumer said a shutdown would give Trump free rein

The Senate has voted to advance a spending bill to keep the government open despite the majority of Democrats objecting to the legislation as an overly partisan bill.

- Eric Garcia

All but one Republican senator, Rand Paul voted for the bill, along with nine Democrats, which proved to be enough to break a filibuster. House Republicans passed the bill on an almost exclusively party-line vote, with many House Democrats objecting to the spending cuts and the fact that it was negotiated without them, criticisms also leveled by Democrats in the Senate. Many Senate Democrats came out against the bill on Thursday before Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would vote to support the continuing resolution that evening.

“We had a Hobson’s choice, an awful CR bill that had no democratic input, very bad bill,” Schumer told reporters on Thursday evening, “But the other choice was having a shutdown. I think that would be the far worse choice.”

Schumer said that a shutdown would give President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, free rein to make cuts that could be even more draconian than the ones in the stopgap spending bill.