Congress Sidesteps a Government Shutdown

Happy Monday! For the fifth year in a row, we’re happy to share that The Morning Dispatch March Madness bracket pool is back! 

To enter, click here (you will need a free ESPN account) and select “Join Group.” The password is “TMD2K25!” and your bracket must be submitted by 12:15 p.m. ET on Thursday. Anyone is invited to participate, but if you want to be eligible for prizes for finishing in the top three—including a yearlong Dispatch Premium membership, a TMD mug, or a gift card to our merch store—you must be a) an active paying member on or before March 19, and b) fill out this form so we can connect you with your ESPN entry.

We’ll keep you updated on the leaderboard over the next few weeks! [Editor’s note: Go Dawgs!]

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) carried out a wave of aerial and naval strikes targeting Houthi sites across Yemen on Saturday, hitting air defenses, drone systems, and missile stockpiles controlled by the U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The attacks followed the Iranian-backed group’s campaign of “piracy, violence, and terrorism against American, and other, ships, aircraft, and drones” in the Red Sea, President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “To Iran: Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY!” Since October 2023, attacks by the Houthis have sunk at least two vessels, killed four seafarers, and forced international shipping companies to avoid the strategic waterway in favor of alternate routes. The group vowed on Saturday to respond to the American strikes, while U.S. officials indicated that the military campaign—the largest of Trump’s second term thus far—would continue. 
• The U.S. military, supported by Iraqi intelligence, conducted a “precision airstrike” in Iraq’s western Al Anbar region on Thursday, killing the Islamic State’s No. 2 leader—Abdallah Makki Muslih al-Rifai, also known as Abu Khadijah—and one other ISIS operative. Khadijah was responsible for the international terrorist group’s operations, logistics, financing, and planning, CENTCOM said Friday. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani hailed the strike on Friday, describing Khadijah as “one of the most dangerous terrorists in Iraq and the world.”
• The Trump administration on Saturday deported hundreds of alleged members of Tren de Aragua—a Venezuelan gang—under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, despite a court order blocking the government from using the obscure law to carry out deportations. Following President Trump’s Friday executive order invoking the authority, which gives the president wartime powers to deport illegal immigrants with little to no due process, Judge James E. Boasberg said Saturday that he did not believe the law offered grounds for the deportations and ordered planes that had already departed to return. On Sunday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that the administration had violated the order by going through with the deportations, stating that the flights were already over international waters at the time of Boasberg’s order. She added that federal courts “have no jurisdiction” over the president’s Article II powers “to remove foreign alien terrorists from U.S. soil and repel a declared invasion.” 
• President Trump delivered a rare presidential speech from the Justice Department on Friday, promising to “expose” his perceived enemies, accusing several media outlets of “illegal” behavior, and declaring himself the country’s “chief law enforcement officer”—a title typically used in reference to the attorney general. “Our predecessors turned this Department of Justice into the Department of Injustice,” Trump said, promising to end what he described as politically motivated prosecutions. Also on Friday, the president signed an executive order suspending the security clearances held by employees of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison—a prominent New York-based law firm whose former lawyer, Mark F. Pomerantz, was singled out in the DOJ speech for overseeing the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s investigation into Trump. The order marked the third occasion in which the president has targeted a private law firm.
• Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Serbia’s capital of Belgrade on Saturday to demonstrate against the leadership of President Aleksandar Vučić. The mass protests—by some counts the largest in Serbia’s history—followed months of demonstrations demanding government accountability in the wake of a railway station collapse that killed 15 people in November. Former Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned in January over the disaster, but Vučić—who has led Serbia for 13 years—has rejected calls to step down.
• President Trump on Friday signed an executive order instructing the United States Agency for Global Media—which oversees Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and other government-funded outlets—to slash its operations to the bare minimum required by law. The White House said the move, part of the administration’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal government, would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.” The agency’s broadcasters reach more than 400 million listeners worldwide, often serving as the only sources for independent news in authoritarian countries. The head of VOA said Saturday that nearly his entire staff—more than 1,300 people—had been put on administrative leave.  
• NASA’s Crew-10 mission docked at the International Space Station on Sunday, two days after launching from the Kennedy Space Center. Four astronauts aboard the SpaceX crew capsule will now take over duties from Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, the NASA astronauts whose planned eight-day orbit was extended to more than nine months after technical problems with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft upon which they arrived. Williams and Wilmore are expected to depart the station as soon as Wednesday.
• Powerful storms killed at least 40 people in seven states in the South and Midwest over the weekend. The low pressure system fueled wildfires and high winds, with the National Weather Service confirming dozens of tornadoes. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared states of emergency.
• Former Sen. Alan Simpson, a Wyoming Republican known for forging friendships across the political aisle, died Friday at the age of 93. The politician, remembered by his family as an “uncommonly generous man,” was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian honor—by former President Joe Biden in 2022. “Though we didn’t agree on everything, he was a man of enormous decency and integrity, toughness and humor,” Biden wrote Friday. 
• Former Rep. Nita M. Lowey, a Democrat from New York, died at age 87 on Saturday following a battle with metastatic breast cancer. Lowey served in the House for more than three decades, becoming the first woman to chair the powerful Appropriations Committee in 2018—a moment she later recalled as her proudest achievement. “A public servant in the truest sense, she was guided by the Jewish core value of ‘Tikkun Olam,’ repairing the world,” her family wrote in a statement. 

Shutdown, Averted 

Members of the House of Representatives and Senate returned to Washington, D.C., last week with one goal: stopping a government shutdown by 11:59 p.m. on Friday. If lawmakers could not agree on a bill to fund the federal government ahead of that deadline, nonessential services would stop, and many federal employees would be furloughed.

They succeeded—barely. The Senate voted 54-46 to pass a House Republican-backed continuing resolution (CR), a stop-gap measure to extend government funding, just hours before the deadline. The breakthrough followed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s eleventh-hour decision to endorse the legislation, bringing with him enough Democrats to overcome the 60-vote threshold to beat the filibuster.

“While the CR bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse,” Schumer said in a floor speech. “Therefore, I will vote to keep the government open and not shut it down.”

Nobody loves CRs—which generally extend current spending rather than allow the two sides to reach an agreement tailored to the circumstances of the coming fiscal period—but Republicans still counted last week’s Capitol Hill saga as a win. Efforts to avert a shutdown highlighted divides between House and Senate Democrats, as the party’s leadership struggles to adopt a uniform strategy in the face of President Donald Trump’s sweeping efforts to overhaul the federal government. 

The latest government funding showdown followed a breakdown in negotiations between Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Appropriations Committees earlier this month. In the absence of a bipartisan compromise, House Republicans unveiled their CR, which included a slight increase to defense spending but trimmed other areas of the federal budget, on March 8. Amid Democratic opposition, the first step was to pass it through the unruly Republican majority in the House—a difficult hurdle, even with Trump’s endorsement. Members of the fiscally hawkish House Freedom Caucus have a history of voting down continuing resolutions.

This time, however, the Freedom Caucus took an official position in favor of the CR. Ahead of the House’s vote on Tuesday, Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland argued for the stop-gap measure at House GOP leadership’s press conference. “This is not your grandfather’s continuing resolution,” he said. “This is a different type of spending bill that I think is the way that we need to do in order to keep the Trump administration, Elon Musk, and DOGE to continue its promise to the American people to fight fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal government and increase its efficiency.”

Still, there was the potential for defectors. Rep. Thomas Massie was a guaranteed “no” on the CR, which meant—assuming unanimous Democratic opposition—that House Speaker Mike Johnson needed every other House Republican to support the bill. Coming out of their closed-door meeting in which Vice President J.D. Vance made the case to the conference, not all Republicans were sold on it. “A CR is not doing their job,” Rep. Rich McCormick of Georgia told reporters. “It’s not passing a budget, and it’s not doing what we need to do to save this nation from a debt crisis that’s going to overwhelm us.”

But Johnson projected confidence throughout the day, predicting that House Republicans would lose just one vote. And as it turned out, he was right. The CR passed the House 217-213, with Massie voting against it and Democratic Rep. Jared Golden of Maine joining Republicans in support of the measure. After the vote, McCormick denounced the bill but said it was better than a shutdown. “I reluctantly voted for this Continuing Resolution because the alternative is worse,” he wrote on X.

Democrats had a much tougher job justifying voting for the measure in the Senate. And despite holding the majority in the upper chamber, Republicans still needed eight Democrats—GOP Sen. Rand Paul had vowed to vote against the CR—to cross the aisle and vote to overcome the filibuster. Sen. John Fetterman had said he would vote for the bill if it prevented a shutdown. That left seven.

It was easier said than done, though. As The Dispatch reported last month, one of Democrats’ main priorities during negotiations in the appropriations process was ensuring that Trump would spend the funds the way Congress intended. If they voted for a CR that did not have that guarantee, they would lose their leverage in future negotiations. At the same time, they were cognizant of the fact that a shutdown could lead to more firings of federal employees in the wake of Musk and DOGE’s efforts. This left Democrats with a choice: Do they vote for a CR they hate, or do they vote to shut the government down and risk inadvertently granting Trump more control over the federal workforce?

“I think what everyone is wrestling with is that either outcome is terrible, right?” Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico told reporters. “This president has put us in a position where, in either direction, lots of people’s constituents are going to get hurt and hurt badly.”

Both Senate conferences hold lunches on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and Democrats spent all three this week debating that question. At times, reporters standing outside could hear yelling coming from the room.

The outcome of the internal debates emerged Thursday, as Schumer lent the bill his reluctant support in a speech on the Senate floor, allowing Congress to avert a shutdown. But his headache was—and still is—far from over. Members of the Democratic base pushing for a stronger response to Trump and Musk’s overhaul campaign coined the term “Schumer surrender.” Democrats in the House, who were about an hour’s drive away in Leesburg, Virginia, on their yearly retreat, were not too happy either. “I think there is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters on Thursday. Some House Democrats have reportedly even urged the New York congresswoman to primary Schumer. 

In an emergency press conference on Friday to reiterate his conference’s opposition to the bill, meanwhile, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries dodged multiple questions about Schumer’s political fate. Asked by a reporter whether it was time for new leadership in the Senate, he responded: “Next question.” When asked whether he’d lost confidence in Schumer, the House minority leader repeated: “Next question.”

But not all members of the party have taken that tack. Schumer’s fellow Senate Democrats, even if they did not vote the same way, offered more ardent defenses of his leadership. Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota told TMD she was “not going to second-guess Chuck.” And Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia also shrugged off calls for Schumer to resign. 

“We’ve all taken our hits from the base,” he told reporters. “I get hit almost every other week.”

Today’s Must-Read

Toeing the Company Line

Worth Your Time

• For Grist magazine, Katie Yoder tracked Tesla’s transformation from Democratic status symbol to Republican icon, considering whether Donald Trump’s embrace could eventually boost the popularity of electric vehicles. “Tesla has lost more than half of its value since December as sales have plummeted worldwide. With Musk dismantling parts of the federal government as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, the vehicles have become a toxic symbol for Democrats, a large portion of Tesla owners. Over the past week, protesters have vandalized Tesla dealerships, set Cybertrucks aflame, and boycotted the brand. Liberal Tesla drivers have slapped stickers on their cars that read ‘I bought this before Elon went crazy,’” she wrote. “Just two years ago, Trump complained that EVs needed a charge every 15 minutes and would kill American jobs. But, after Musk endorsed his presidential campaign last summer and donated $288 million, Trump softened his tone, saying that he was in favor of ‘a very small slice’ of cars being electric. ‘I have to be, you know,’ Trump said, ‘because Elon endorsed me very strongly.’ On Tuesday, as Trump climbed into his new electric car for the first time, he seemed surprised by what he saw there. ‘That’s beautiful,’ he said, admiring the dashboard. ‘This is a different panel than I’ve had. Everything’s computer!’”

Presented Without Comment

Daily Beast: Minnesota Republicans Want to Classify ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ as a Mental Illness

Also Presented Without Comment

NBC News: Vance Discusses Elon Musk’s ‘Mistakes’ and ‘Incremental Progress’ on the Economy

Vice President J.D. Vance acknowledged Friday that Elon Musk has made “mistakes” while executing mass firings of federal employees and emphasized that he believes there are “a lot of good people who work in the government.”

“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake. I’m accepting of mistakes,” Vance said in an interview with NBC News. 

…

Meanwhile, Trump’s push for tariffs on foreign products has ignited fears of a trade war that could raise consumer prices.

“Now I have to be honest with you,” Vance said in Bay City. “The road ahead of us is long, but we are already, in just seven short weeks, starting to see early indications of the president’s vision becoming our shared American reality.”

In the Zeitgeist

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Chicago dyed its river green on Saturday morning, kicking off an annual parade with performances showcasing Irish step dancers, bagpipers, and a dance troupe called the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies. 

Let Us Know

Are you celebrating St. Patrick’s Day this year?