Sound off -- one, two! Sound off -- three, four! Bring it on down -- five, six, seven, eight ... end debate!
Hey, look, when you have to compete with Beege Welborn for headline clicks, you gotta improvise. Adapt. Overcome.
If you haven't yet taken advantage of our Schumer Shutdown discount on VIP membership, John Thune wants you to know you're running out of time. Contrary to the headline, the Senate Majority Leader claims he has been told that "several" Senate Dems have become desperate to end the game of chicken Chuck Schumer is playing with the shutdown. The numbers from Harry Enten are bad enough, but the prospect of cutting off food stamps and another paycheck for the bureaucratic class that supports them has Schumer's crew looking for an exit:
🚨 JUST IN: Sen. John Thune confirms he's been going AROUND Chuck Schumer in back-channel negotiations and has learned several Democrat members DESPERATELY want to cave and end the shutdown.
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 28, 2025
"There are rank-and-file Democrats, we've had back-channel conversations...that have… pic.twitter.com/OB0NRPCjmy
"There are rank-and-file Democrats, we've had back-channel conversations...that have intensified."
"There are people who want to get this figured out on the Democrat side."
"There are. But the challenge is the Democrat leadership couldn't care LESS about this."
"Chuck Schumer, they're in a BOX. They are running SCARED of the far-left."
How much stock should we put in this? Claiming that the rank and file of the opposing party are about to revolt -- or would, if they could go public -- is as hoary a cliché as there is in politics. Joe Biden used to pull this out on practically every initiative not only of his own administration but also in the Barack Obama years. Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer used to trot this out at least occasionally, too. Almost every time it was nonsense, but it played well in the press, especially as the national media transformed itself into the DNC's spin amplification system.
The shoe is on the other foot now. The Schumer Shutdown is a game of chicken with almost no stakes, other than the desire by the Left to mindlessly obstruct as to make everything involving Donald Trump a crisis. The problem is that this clean CR doesn't actually involve Trump, and Democrats have made clean CRs their perpetual demand in every previous budget fight with the GOP.
Here's where the cliché may actually be true in this case: Thune's right. Schumer has marched Senate Democrats into a box canyon, and maybe even right into the Valley Of Political Death. At least thus far, Schumer has risked the ire of the bureaucratic class and the poor he claims to protect, but he's risking their economic health to attempt a repeal of the reconciliation bill's reforms -- which had been more or less a dead issue with voters. No one cares about shutdowns either until the money gets cut off, at which point the beneficiaries will get very, very angry ... and not with the party offering a clean CR while budget negotiations continue.
That's why Thune and Trump have poured cold water on measures that might let Senate Dems off the hook. Initally, Thune and other Republicans had hinted at side bills to keep certain funding flowing, but Thune made it clear today that option is off the table, full stop. The AFGE's demand yesterday to pass the CR got ignored today in the Senate, but as the end of the week approaches and yet another paycheck is lost by their 820,000 workers, AFGE will get even more vocal. And if funding isn't restored by Saturday morning, 30-40 million SNAP recipients are going to run out of options to keep food on the table as well.
And that's a lot of voters who have mainly voted Democrat until recently. Maybe they have been entertained by all of the Trump Derangement Syndrome posturing and the No Kings rallies, but I'd bet they didn't expect to starve as a consequence of that strategy.
All Thune needs is eight Senate Democrats to sound off and end debate. How many will cross the aisle tomorrow?
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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