Catie Edmondson
speaker
234 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 17 Oct
Catie Edmondson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
It was a stunning moment, and it was really remarkable to see this very public fissure.
So it starts with a fairly typical procedure up here on the Hill, which is we're staring down another government funding deadline. Lawmakers need to pass something to ensure the government doesn't shut down.
Yeah, exactly. Although this time the script sort of flips, right? Because normally what you and I are talking about is how these funding decisions pit Republican against Republican. Right. But what happened here is actually the opposite, is that for once House Republicans were able to unite around this spending bill that Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled.
And the reason they were able to unite around this is sort of for two reasons. One is because it was an entirely Republican written bill. Democrats had no input into what this bill looked like at all. But two is because a lot of them were saying, look, it would be bad for President Trump if the government shut down. Let's ensure that he can continue the great work his administration is doing.
And that is actually what happened. House Republicans were able to pass this stopgap spending bill with really minimal drama. on their side, which is, I think, a fact that shocked a lot of Democrats. And in fact, all Democrats except one vote against it because they want to show that they are standing up to President Trump and that they're taking a principled stand.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. And that infuriates a lot of Democrats. They actually fundamentally hate this bill. They say that this is a piece of legislation that doesn't have the sort of narrow spending instructions that Congress normally gives the executive branch.
And so the argument is essentially this bill creates a lot of slush funds for the administration to be able to use however they want.
And at a moment where Democratic members of Congress already feel that the executive branch is running absolute roughshod over sort of congressional spending prerogatives. Yes.
That's right. In order to get a final vote on the spending bill, Republicans need to be able to break a filibuster, which means if the bill is allowed to proceed, it's going to require Democratic support.
Well, that is the early indication.
Because of that... This is not something Democratic senators can support. Let's try to draft some sort of bipartisan bill that we can all get behind.
But clearly that's something Republicans don't want to do. And instead, what Democratic senators find themselves faced with is what many of them describe to me as a really agonizing decision.
So they're faced with this dilemma, which is which path gives Trump the least amount of leverage? A lot of them, I think, viewed this as a moment to be able to use sort of the little remaining power they have left in Congress in the minority to say, we're going to shut the government down. We are not going to vote to allow Trump to continue the status quo.
We are going to throw sand in the gears here. We will not lend our votes to support what you're doing.
That's right. Now, the other option that senators are weighing is a lot of them are very concerned that if they do, in fact, vote to filibuster this bill, Democrats will be blamed for shutting the government down, which is something that we know voters hate. But there's a deeper fear, which is that by shutting the government down, you actually empower the Trump administration even more.
Well, in a shutdown, the Trump administration and specifically the Office of Management and Budget, which is run by a real conservative hardliner, gets to decide which federal workers are deemed essential and which are deemed non-essential.
So there was a real fear by a number of Democratic senators that this could essentially lead to mass furloughs, could accelerate the mass layoffs we've been seeing of federal workers.
Exactly. And there's a second fear, which is if you shut the government down, how can you ever get it back open? And there's a specific fear that under the Trump administration and with this Republican Congress, maybe they end up opening only the parts of government they like and letting the parts of government they don't like remain permanently shut down.
In fact, Senate Democrats met three days in a row for these luncheons that dragged on. And you could actually hear sort of them debating, right, yelling during these luncheons because this was a truly difficult decision for so many of them. But it seems like the way that the room is leaning increasingly is that it is leaning toward a shutdown.
Well, Leader Schumer, in fact, on Thursday at this luncheon, shocks many of his members when he stands up and makes the announcement that he is, in fact, reversing himself and has made the calculation that it is going to be better for Democrats to vote to support this legislation, to clear the way for this bill, that shutting down the government is a bad option for Democrats.
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