If this is the lie that catches your attention and frustration, you need to come out from under your rock a little more often.
Republicans have gone MAGA cult and will lie their faces off to please Trump. Democrats continue their decades long winning-streak of “most ineffective leadership”. Par for the course in 2025.
It’s a legitimate question, it’s not a lie that Democrats are blocking the GOP on this and you need to get educated on how your government works.
tl;dr: A budget bill needs a supermajority to pass and be fillibuster proof.
- A supermajority is 60- 67- or 75
- 60 votes are not needed to pass a budget since 1974 when they put a clause in specifically to ensure the budget can bypass the filibuster after 20 hrs.
It’s also not a lie that Trump has ordered Republicans not to negotiate with Democrats because a shutdown gives him more power to fire people from the executive branch.
I believe the united states government was effectively shut down in April 2025. This funding situation is a red herring.
Politics. That is all.
It takes more than the simple majority to get the budget approved. They need 7 votes from the Democrats to pass it.
Adding this because I don’t see it explained anywhere else:
It takes 60/100 votes to pass the budget bills in the Senate, instead of 51, because the Senate still has a filibuster. The minority Democrats have the power to stop the vote from coming up by simply talking on the floor forever until the Republicans give up and go home.
The 53-47 vote was for a cloture motion, which is to put time limits on debate on a particular budget bill. The rules don’t let Dems filibuster the cloture motion for obvious reasons, so that vote happened. But it takes 60 votes to pass cloture, so it went down.
Now, there are some resolutions that don’t involve coming to a compromise:
- the Democrats could choose not to do the filibuster. Then the bill would come up, and they could all vote against it, but it could pass on 53 votes.
- the Senate could change the rules to get rid of filibuster. This is usually called the “nuclear option” because it removes the 60 vote barrier using a rules vote that only needs 51 to pass. The procedure is to make someone actually start a filibuster, then raise a point of order that filibustering member is taking too long. The Parliamentarian will deny the point of order based on the current rules, but that can be appealed to the whole Senate on a majority vote. And the point of order is not debatable.
Is it 51 or 50 plus the vice president?
Everything that says 51 can be read as 50 plus VP,.
It’s majority of the senate present with quorum. The vp only votes in ties.
The budget can bypass the filibuster (for the most part). They would have to let the Democrats bs for 20 hrs and then it would only take 51 votes to pass the budget. (Or at least the majority of it that I know of). This is intentional, but if they are putting extraneous bologna in the bill, that would cause it to need 60 for those parts. But all of the budgetary needs should be 51
There is a rule that the reconciliation bill can pass on 51. But there are two main limits on reconciliation:
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Reconciliation has to be at least nominally about the budget, as you said, and
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Only one reconciliation bill per fiscal year.
The Republicans already shot their reconciliation shot with the BBB. They can’t do it again until the next fiscal year (which arrives tomorrow, so they can get started).
2 isn’t correct though, there is no limitations on the number of reconciliations that can be filed.
You can file one for every budget resolution made. Which being that this is a different resolution than the BBB which already passed, it has no ties or limitations to it
From The Wiki:
Congress can pass up to three reconciliation bills per year, with each bill addressing the major topics of reconciliation: revenue, spending, and the federal debt limit. However, if Congress passes a reconciliation bill affecting more than one of those topics, it cannot pass another reconciliation bill later in the year affecting one of the topics addressed by the previous reconciliation bill.[3] In practice, reconciliation bills have usually been passed once per year at most.[16]
Edit: Are you saying the Senate and House made two identical budget resolutions in this year? Or is it just that Senate Republicans don’t want to blow reconciliation for the next year on what is probably mostly continuing resolution?
That information doesn’t line up with History. When a second budget is drawn up in the same year, you can reconcile it.
Say 2021, budget passed in February, then the “Build Back Better Act” went to reconciliation in 2021 and failed.
But it didn’t fail do to reconciliation limits, but rather votes
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Correction: it is no longer necessary for a Senator to keep talking on the floor to create a filibuster. Any Senator can now simply indicate a filibuster and require an immediate cloture to bypass it. This is sometimes called a “silent filibuster” but mostly it just kept the same name which prevents the public from being aware of the difference.
This is only true because the Senate’s floor time is valuable enough that leadership would rather move on to consider other bills than waste time on a real filibuster. The “silent filibuster” is not an official part of Senate rules.
People have been saying that Congress is gridlocked and ineffective, and that is true, by several subjective and objective measures. But even in the gridlocked state there are still a bunch of bills that are debated and passed. And it takes floor time to work on those.
The “silent filibuster” is not an official part of Senate rules.
The silent filibuster results from a change to Senate rule #12, aka “Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of The Senate” that was made in 1970. It allowed the Senate, for the first time, to move on to the next bill in the event of a filibuster. So in effect there’s no longer a “talk it to death” requirement to prevent a bill from reaching a vote.
And since the GOP shits on everything left of far right atm, they get to be petty and maybe get some ground back. Plus last time around, the Dems had leverage and blew it spectacularly. Schumer wrote a strongly worded letter I believe. I feel bad for federal workers, but this government needs a rework anyhow. And not the technocratic, corpo, or fascist facelift some seem to yearn for.
Most Republicans don’t know who was president 6 years ago (2019). Fox news would have them believe it was either Biden or Obama. So it’s even easier for Fox news to just say the Dems are shutting down the government and cult will happily believe it.
A complete loss of Journalism. Information and its dissemination and main stream access to it, including the echo chambers of social media, have been torn to shreds. Whats left is a propaganda machine. Couple that with the lack of critical thinking taught at any level of education we cannot possibly expect an individual to understand the basics of this current political machine or why the majority of people will CONTINUE EN MASSE to vote against their own interest and well being. Hence your question.
Wild that this is EL5 and only one serious response.
The government is funded through appropriations bills. The US government is set to run out of funding tonight, absent the bipartisan support for a continuing resolution to continue funding the government, and as of this moment, the Republicans need Democratic votes to support it as they lack a supermajority.
Democrats, having no power to legislate due to being in the minority, are using this opportunity try and force concessions from Republicans, as the minority basically always does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror also known as the “NO U” defense.
Takes a vote of 60 in the senate to pass the budget. They can’t achieve that without Dems.
Adam Schiff has a non rage YouTube where he puts out short little updates. He did one on the shutdown yesterday.
Schiff even went so far as to add a Vader clip to describe current negotiation tactics. That was new. Usually he just sits in a chair and talks to the camera.
People keep saying this, but it isn’t true in of itself. It requires 51 through budget reconciliation.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/house-bill/7130
The Republicans not going through with it aren’t doing so because they want to include things that do not pertain to the budget.
Schiff even went so far as to add a Vader clip to describe current negotiation tactics.
It makes every bit of sense to reference vader in this current government. Even if you get an agreement with trump to fund the things you want to fund, the way he is operating right now he can just impound the funds anyway and send them off to wherever else he wants.
There’s no point in negotiating with this president or this congress when they let this president impound whatever he likes, fund whatever he likes, and then get a series of high fives and “no notes” decisions from the supreme court for doing so.
They have absolutely no incentive to negotiate when the deals are toilet paper, and no incentive to vote for continuing to fund a government that currently doesn’t fund itself according to its laws.
They should allow it to shut down until the constitutional order is restored (which may be never). The repubs can change the senate rules and nuke the last vestiges of the filibuster to reopen the government with a simple majority. Democrats should force them to do so.
Trump has ordered Republicans not to negotiate with Democrats because a shutdown gives him more power to fire people from the executive branch.
He was firing people regardless. I think this admin had long since proven that they do not care about federal employees.
But the shutdown gives him more latitude. He wants the shutdown.
Have you gotten the texts today? They’re unhinged. The banner texts on the .gov site, unhinged.
It’s like hearing that kid from high school, forever in detention or on suspension, the kid with severe anger management issues that scared everyone such that he had no friends, argue his case, loudly, when no one asked for it.
It never made sense, it was always more juvenile than the class around him, but he persisted anyway like he was the only sane person at that grade level.
That’s this administration. Fucking weird and really scary, at best.
The man talked to a room of 800+ generals about how he walks up and down stairs carefully. And that the reason nobody respects America is because Biden fell on stairs.
For the men there that have been too busy to do much in direct contact with Trump, I bet this caused a bit of a stomach drop. This is the reality of the man in charge.
If there was anyone in that room who didn’t already realize he’s a demented idiot, I doubt their opinion changed.
They have to have more than just a simple majority, and not even all the Republicans want it.
Trump has ordered Republicans not to negotiate with Democrats because a shutdown gives him more power to fire people from the executive branch.
They technically lost a Republican vote to the dems, plus a simple majority won’t do it.
Also, they want this shutdown. Even if 100% of dems vote for it, republicans will magically change their mind last minute.
I want to know why there would be one when we are so rich with tarriff money supposedly.
Reading this thread, I’m so glad I live in a country where government procedures at least somewhat make sense. I don’t think there’s any other place where the government failing to pass a budget wouldn’t mean that government collapsing, new elections being called, and civil servants keeping the lights on until a new government is formed. It’s crazy that the biggest economy in the world can just stop paying its employees because two political parties can grind the whole system to a halt.
Most Presidential democracies have systems like that; which would include most of the Americas. Hell, France is kind of going through that right now as well.
Even then, government shutdowns didn’t become a thing until the 1980’s.
For France we don’t have an acting government as now but people not being payed is not a possibility. If the budget is not voted, the system use the previous budget to continue to act and pay the salaries.
people talk about separation of church and state, but i’m pretty sure america has missed the even more important separation of government and state
the way it should work and how i think it works in most places these days; is that the parliament is the main thing that keeps things running and is made up of hundreds of people from different parties, and then on top of that you have the government which is a subset of those people who make larger decisions. And if for some reason the government ceases being able to function (e.g. because enough parliamentarians oppose the current government) then it mostly just means that the big decisions have to be delayed until government can be restored, and aside from that no one notices much of anything.
Built-in inertia in the institutions of the state should ideally keep the state and it’s institutions from collapsing even in the absence of the government. Absence of governance should only mean that new acts aren’t passed until a government resumes, it shouldn’t mean that existing laws and acts become unenforced and existing systems (like civil servant roles) cease to function or be funded.
This inertia really helps when prime minister’s and governments are regularly deleted, as we had in Australia some years back, and as the UK had with Lettuce Truss et. al.
Very true.
And the people making these decisions are all multi-millionaires themselves and completely insulated from the fallout, which to me is the most egregious aspect, but here in the US you basically can’t run for office if you aren’t already wealthy.
I always wondered how are furloughed people tolerating not getting paid and not quitting. With how frequent it happens, some has to be looking for a new job. Yes I know some people can’t find jobs outside of govt right now
It’s a group effort of pathological lying
To swear in a new dem house member needed to release the Epstein files.
