Patty Murray voices Democrats’ outrage over GOP spending bill after Schumer folds to avert shutdown

WASHINGTON – Before the Senate voted on Friday to fund the government and avert a shutdown, Sen. Patty Murray made it known that she wasn’t happy.

The dean of Washington’s congressional delegation, the longest-tenured Democrat in the Senate and her party’s leader on the Appropriations Committee, Murray has spent more than three decades mastering Congress’s most fundamental job: funding the government through a painstaking, once-a-year process of writing 12 appropriations bills that members of both parties can get behind.

So when she took to the Senate floor on Friday – after Republicans cast aside that tradition and wrote their own legislation, daring Democrats to swallow the GOP bill or trigger a shutdown – Murray was mad.

“For the last several months, I have remained at the table, ready to negotiate funding bills,” she said. “But instead of working with us in good faith to fund the government in a bipartisan way, Speaker Johnson and Republican leadership walked away and started working on a Republican funding bill – without an ounce, not an ounce, of Democratic input.”

The so-called continuing resolution, known in Capitol Hill shorthand as a “CR,” keeps current spending relatively flat through the end of September, with a few exceptions that incensed Murray and her fellow Democrats. It adds billions for the military and President Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of immigrants while cutting funding for other programs and excluding the spending directives that would be in a regular spending bill, which Murray argues will effectively give the Trump administration a “slush fund” to use however it wants.

“What Republicans are pushing here is not a continuing resolution,” Murray said. “In this case, ‘CR’ stands for complete resignation, because what Republicans are doing here is ceding more discretion to two billionaires to decide what does and does not get funded in their states.”

Those two billionaires – Trump and his de facto governing partner Elon Musk, the world’s richest man – have spent their first two months in office aggressively firing government workers, dismantling entire agencies and otherwise carrying out what the president says is a sweeping mandate to remake the government.

Schumer argued that letting the government shut down would do even more to accelerate the dismantling of government agencies and programs that Trump and his administration have carried out at a breakneck pace.

“As bad as the CR is,” he said on Friday, “I believe that allowing President Trump to take more power is a far worse option.”

Whether or not she intended it, Murray’s allegation of “complete resignation” in the face of that agenda seemed to apply not only to Republicans. The GOP spending bill only passed because Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced late Thursday that he would help Republicans reach the 60-vote supermajority needed to overcome the filibuster and let the bill pass with only a simple majority.

Murray and her fellow Washington Democrat, Sen. Maria Cantwell, voted against the motion. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, a Gonzaga Law School alumna, was among the 10 Democrats who voted to break the filibuster, although she voted against the bill itself.

The bill ultimately passed by a vote of 54 to 36, with retiring Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, voting in favor. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the sole Republican to oppose the bill.

In her floor speech, Murray didn’t explicitly criticize Schumer, her fellow 74-year-old who has served alongside her since 1999. Democrats in the House, however – not to mention left-wing activists outside Congress – were quick to express their displeasure.

“I’m incredibly disappointed in the Senate’s vote to pass Republicans’ partisan spending bill,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Seattle, wrote on X. “Democrats should not be complicit in giving a blank check to Trump and Elon Musk.”

Schumer’s reversal was especially frustrating to his fellow Democrats because he had publicly insisted for days, along with Murray and other party leaders, that he would oppose the GOP bill.

In the House, Democratic leaders kept all but one of their party’s members unified – even vulnerable Democrats in Republican-leaning districts, like Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez of southwest Washington – in opposition to the GOP bill when it passed on Tuesday.

The House GOP’s campaign arm was quick to pounce on Gluesenkamp Perez’s vote, sending an email on Tuesday with a subject line – “Marie Gluesenkamp Perez Vote to Prioritize Politics Over Oregonians” – that seemed to mistake the state she represents.

While the political fallout for most Democrats won’t be clear until November 2026, Schumer may see consequences sooner as Democrats fume over his handling of the spending bill. But when Murray was asked by reporters if her colleagues were asking her to replace him as leader, she brushed off the question, as Politico reported, saying, “No, no. I’m just doing my job today.”