Republicans have a 53-seat Senate majority, a House that just passed a continuing resolution, a president who has delivered historic legislative wins, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune is about to hand Democrats exactly the shutdown scenario they’ve been engineering for months.
Let’s be direct: Democrats want a government shutdown. Not because they think it’s good policy. Because they know what it does to the majority party heading into midterms. A shutdown gives them a simple, clean narrative — Republicans can’t govern — that plays on every television screen in America for as many days as Thune keeps negotiating with people whose entire strategy depends on things falling apart.
And Thune knows this. He’s watched this movie before. And he’s apparently going to walk into it anyway.
The record here is genuinely difficult to defend. When DHS funding was on the table, Thune hesitated, gave Democrats room to maneuver, fell for their delay tactics, and watched the agency go unfunded for nearly 100 days. He then passed a separate Senate bill in the dead of night before leaving town — leaving House Republicans holding the bag and adding institutional rivalry on top of policy chaos. The late Senator Lindsey Graham had to provide the legislative roadmap to finally fund DHS through the rest of the Trump presidency.
Now the government runs out of money on September 30. The House passed a continuing resolution. Thune’s response? He’s going to pass his own CR — with Democrats.
Hey John, buy a clue: Democrats are now the party of Mao. They are full-blown socialists and commies. And they want a government shutdown. Don’t you get it? This isn’t the time of Georgie Bush, and these are not our granddaddy’s Democrats.
This is the same Democratic Party that has spent months using every procedural tool available to block the SAVE America Act, obstruct DHS funding, and create the appearance of Republican dysfunction right before an election. They are not Thune’s negotiating partners. They are his opponents — opponents who will sign onto a deal, pocket the concessions, and then spend September making the case that Republicans needed Democratic help to keep the lights on.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) runs the House with a functionally one-vote majority. He deals with the Freedom Caucus, the moderates, the procedural insurgents, and the members who vote against their own party’s rules just to make a point. And he still gets appropriations bills through — multiple of them. He gets things done because he understands that the alternative to an imperfect win is a damaging loss.
Thune sees a tweet from Thom Tillis or Lisa Murkowski and concludes the fight is over. He’s been wrong about that every single time, and the people who suffer the consequences aren’t Tillis or Murkowski or Thune. They’re the Republican candidates in competitive House districts who are going to spend October explaining why the Senate Republican majority couldn’t govern without Democratic help.
The SAVE America Act has 80% public support. A government shutdown engineered by Democrats is coming in September if Thune doesn’t learn how to count votes and apply pressure.
Republicans don’t have a Democratic problem right now. They have a Thune problem.
And he’s about to make it everyone else’s problem too.
