Two top Illinois Democrats, Gov. JB Pritzker and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, said Friday morning that they oppose a Republican-led stopgap measure that would avoid a partial government shutdown.
“I refuse to vote for Republicans’ slush fund bill that grants (President Donald) Trump and Elon Musk permission to continue rigging our government and economy against the middle class. … Hell no, I cannot support that,” Duckworth said in a social media post Friday.
The stopgap funding bill has already passed in the House and faces a late-Friday deadline in the Senate to avoid a shutdown. While Republicans have a majority in the Senate, they’ll need some Democratic support to advance it with a 60-vote threshold.
“Democrats have the power to stop the cessation of power to Donald Trump and Elon Musk and they should use it,” Pritzker, who has been regularly weighing in on national issues since Trump took office, said in a statement Friday morning.
Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and Illinois’ senior senator, had not said as of Friday morning where he stands on the continuing resolution.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made clear Thursday that he’d vote for the GOP bill to avert a shutdown, highlighting a divide within the Democratic Party.
“As bad as passing the continuing resolution would be, I believe a government shutdown is far worse,” Schumer said in an op-ed published in The New York Times.
Many Democrats in Illinois and elsewhere, eager to use a rare point of leverage against the Republican majority in Congress, billionaire government cost-cutter Elon Musk and Trump, have urged their senators to allow a shutdown by voting against the resolution. They argue that any action is better than allowing Trump’s upending of federal government norms to continue.
Schumer and others, however, have said that allowing funding to lapse could give even more power to Trump and the executive branch.
Pritzker’s top aide, Anne Caprara, posted on social media Friday that the fight within the Democratic Party is not ideological but “between those who want to fight and those who want to cave.”
“And Team Fight stretches across all ideological aspects of the Party,” she wrote. “Misread this at your own peril.”
The Associated Press contributed.
