No. of Recommendations: 5
That's an argument, not a fact. The Republicans knew they'd need Dem votes in the Senate to pass the CR but refused to sit down to negotiate with them. So I'd say they're complicit, at a minimum.
If you like, although the Democrats have a history of insisting that they're not going to negotiate with the Republicans over a shutdown. Didn't want to reward them for taking the government hostage, IIRC - demanded that the GOP pass exactly what the Democrats insisted on. The GOP claimed that the Democrats were acting in bad faith by not trying to woo their votes through negotiation....but that argument got no traction.
GOP responsibility doesn't absolve the Democrats of their own responsibility. Schumer knew - correctly - that the Democrats would get vastly more blame for not providing needed votes in the Senate than they would have for failing to bail out the majority in the House, where the the GOP had the power to pass whatever they wanted. So the Democrats were going to own a lot of this shutdown. And the shutdown was going to hurt Democratic positions against the Administration far more than the reverse.
Their chance to stop the CR was in the House. They failed. Once it went to the Senate, they could either pass it or end up holding the bag on the ensuing shutdown. Believing that the GOP would negotiate during the shutdown is magical thinking - the Administration would have loved every single day of furlough and weeping federal employees and the ability to blame the economic catastrophe of tariffs on the shutdown instead. It would have ended the same way - with the House refusing to take up anything else, and the Senate insisting that it was the House bill or nothing. And eventually the Democrats would have passed the House bill....and be in a far, far worse position.
