Schumer folds + What got done this week

From Covid fraud to crypto.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), one day after suggesting that Democrats were prepared to force a government shutdown, reversed himself on Thursday and announced that he will support the Republican-drafted continuing resolution funding the government through September.

The Senate is set to vote this afternoon on advancing the CR; the measure will need 60 votes to move forward, requiring support from at least seven Democrats. (But more likely eight, because Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is expected to vote against it.) Without a CR, the government is set to shut down at midnight tonight.

Schumer’s back-down was met with outrage from many Democratic lawmakers, some of whom are reportedly urging Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to launch a primary challenge against him in 2028. Even House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) released a statement reiterating that he is “strongly opposed” to the CR, a rare split between the two top Democrats in Washington.

At risk of sounding immodest, if you want to understand why Schumer made his decision, I really think the best thing you can read is yesterday’s newsletter:

There has been no other full-length article on what exactly might happen in a Trump-led shutdown, and I spoke to a range of experts who all agree: it might have looked very different than shutdowns in the past, handing Trump the power to pick which employees to keep and which to send home (potentially for good).

In the past 24 hours, that reality has appeared to set in on both sides of the aisle, with figures like Elon Musk, Matt Gaetz, and Chip Roy bragging about it on the right and lawmakers like Kirsten Gillibrand warning about it on the left (“This will not be a normal shutdown,” Gillibrand could be heard saying at the Capitol yesterday).

By Thursday night, Schumer’s speech on the Senate floor was framed around this fear:

As bad as passing the CR is, as I said, allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.

First, a shutdown would give Donald Trump and Elon Musk carte blanche to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now. The decision on what is essential would be solely left to the executive branch, with nobody left at agencies to check them. In short, a shutdown would give Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE, and Russell Vought the keys to the city, state and country.

“A shutdown will allow DOGE to shift into overdrive,” Schumer added this morning, borrowing the exact subtitle of my Wednesday piece. If you’re wondering what exactly he’s referring to, click here to read more.

I’ve already received a lot of questions about shutdown strategy for my Sunday mailbag piece, so my plan is to talk more about this then, after the vote plays out. If you have a question about the funding fight (or anything else in politics), drop it in the comments here and I’ll try to answer it on Sunday.

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In the meantime, we have Friday business to attend to. Even in the most dysfunctional of times, I try to set aside one day a week here at Wake Up To Politics to look at areas of government function: where members of Congress are working together across party lines. There’s usually more than you might think (and almost none of it gets reported elsewhere).

Here what you should know from the last week:

Combatting Covid fraud

The House passed the Pandemic Unemployment Fraud Enforcement Act in a 295-127 vote, with 83 Democrats joining all Republicans in support. The measure would extend the statute of limitations, from five years to 10 years, for prosecuting fraudulent claims made under the Covid-era unemployment insurance (UI) programs.

This was not a small problem: as of last year, the Justice Department had charged more than 3,500 defendants, recovering $1.4 billion in fraudulent Covid relief funds. But that could be just the tip of the iceberg. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that the total amount of Covid-era UI fraud was somewhere between $100 billion and $135 billion. The DOJ has more than 1,600 potential fraud cases open.

With the statute of limitations set to start running out on March 27 — yes, that means Covid was five years ago (!) — this measure would give prosecutors more time to finish those investigations.

Ending a 13th-century precedent

It’s rare that you’ll see a law from before 1789 cited in this newsletter, but this story starts way back in 1278 with the Statute of Gloucester, an early English piece of legislation enacted during the reign of Edward I.

The statute covers a lot of ground, but one of its provisions states that someone can be charged with murder anytime “within the Year and the Day after the Deed [was] done.” This is known as the “year-and-a-day rule,” and it was imported to the U.S. in 1891, when the Supreme Court — citing common law — overturned a murder convictions because the indictment did not allege that the victims died within one year and one day of the attack.

Three years later, the court explained its reasoning:

If the person alleged to have been murdered die after that time, it cannot be discerned, as the law presumes, whether he died of the stroke or poison, etc., or a natural death; and, in case of life, a rule of law ought to be certain.

In the centuries since, many U.S. states have overturned the rule, noting that modern medicine often allows homicide victims to live more than 366 days after an attack, even if that wasn’t the case in the 1200s.

The 1278 scroll that still dictates U.S. federal law. (Photo by Text Manuscripts)

But federal prosecutors still must abide by it. In one high-profile example, when John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, he also injured Reagan’s press secretary James Brady, who lived in partial paralysis for the rest of his life. When Brady ultimately died in 2014, the medical examiner ruled it a homicide — saying that he died due to injuries sustained in the shooting — but federal prosecutors declined to charge Hinckley for Brady’s death, citing the “year-and-a-day rule” as a reason.

The Justice for Murder Victims Act would strike this rule from the federal books, allowing murder prosecutions no longer how much time elapses between an attack and the victim’s death. It passed the Senate unanimously this week.

Boosting U.S. chip manufacturing

No, not potato chips. Semiconductor chips may be so small that they’re measured in nanometers (billionths of a meter), but they increasingly run our lives. Most modern electronics run on semiconductors, from phones and laptops to microwaves and refrigerators. Artificial intelligence systems rely on semiconductors, too, which means their manufacturing will be critical to AI advancements.

The U.S. once led the world in manufacturing semiconductors, but China has plowed huge sums of money into catching up, boasting an increasing foothold in making the chips that will fuel the future. (Side note: If you want to learn more about this, I highly recommend the book “Chip War.”)

Graphic by Semiconductor Engineering

The bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 was supposed to be the U.S.’ response — except President Trump announced at his address to Congress this month that Congress should “get rid” of the law, without explaining why.

As I reported at the time, even Republican lawmakers who had backed the 2022 bill applauded Trump’s remarks. But they have shown no desire to follow through on his demand; in fact, this week, the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously approved a bipartisan bill that will build on the Biden-era law.

The Securing Semiconductor Supply Chains Act would direct the Commerce Department to consult with state-level economic officials and put together a report with recommendations for how to “boost foreign direct investment in domestic manufacturing and to help secure the semiconductor supply chain of the United States.”

DC ❤️ Crypto

Oftentimes when the government changes hands across party lines, Washington sees a spike in usage of the Congressional Review Act (CRA), a tool Congress can use to overturn executive branch regulations.

This is usually a pretty partisan exercise: an administration of one party implements a regulation, then a Congress of the other party comes in and overturns it. Which is why it’s notable this week that a measure overturning a Biden-era regulation passed 292-132 in the House (with 76 Democrats joining all Republican) and 70-27 in the Senate (with 19 Democrats joining all Republicans). Even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) voted to ditch the rule, an unusual rebuke of the Biden administration from the Senate’s top Democrat.

As far as I was able to tell from looking through decades of CRA votes, never before have so many lawmakers voted to overturn a regulation put in place by a president of their own party.

What inspired this surprising level of bipartisanship? Cryptocurrency. The resolution in question would repeal an IRS rule that treats decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms — which have been described as crypto’s “version of Wall Street” — as brokers, stepping up what these platforms have to report to tax collectors.

Critics of the rule say it is overly broad, impacting platforms that provide digital infrastructure to crypto exchanges but aren’t involved in trading themselves, and goes beyond the IRS’ legal mandate. (Fun fact: The legal authority the IRS used to promulgate the rule stems from a little-noticed provision in the bipartisan infrastructure package, which directed the agency to increase reporting requirements involving digital assets.)

But proponents argue that repealing it would allow participants in the crypto sector to skirt tax law and would result in the U.S. losing $3.9 billion in tax revenue over the next decade, per a Joint Committee on Taxation estimate.

And that’s not all. The Senate Banking Committee approved the bipartisan GENIUS Act in a 18-6 vote this week, the “first time a Senate panel has ever advanced major crypto legislation,” per Politico. The measure would set up a regulatory structure for stablecoins (a type of cryptocurrency for which the value is pegged to another asset, whether that’s a commodity or a different type of currency).

Proponents of the bill say it will unleash innovation; critics say it sets up overly weak regulations promoted by the crypto industry. Five Democrats joined the panel’s Republicans in advancing the measure.

Both pieces of legislation cement the cypto industry as a major player in Washington, especially given its influence in the Trump administration — and its extensive campaign spending, which has flowed to both parties, perhaps helping explain the bills’ bipartisan support.

Graphic by the Washington Post

The crypto industry poured more than $134 billion into campaign advertising in the 2024 cycle, benefitting Democratic and Republican candidates alike.

Parental leave for lawmakers

During Covid, House Democrats allowed members of the chamber to vote by proxy, which let members ask a colleague to cast their vote for them if they were “unable to physically attend proceedings in the House Chamber due to the ongoing public health emergency.”

The rules change was often abused by members of both parties (who would vote by proxy for non-Covid-related reasons), and Republicans ended it when they won back the majority in 2023.

Now, a bipartisan group is seeking to restore proxy voting — for a very specific group: new parents. A resolution by Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) and Brittany Petterson (D-CO) would allow House members to vote by proxy for 12 weeks after giving birth, or after their spouse has given birth.

After House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) declined to include the proposal in the rules package for this Congress, Luna and Petterson initiated a discharge petition, which allows rank-and-file lawmakers to force a vote on the House floor if 218 members (a simple majority) sign on.

This week, their petition crossed the finish line, forcing a House vote on the rules change. (Johnson, who views any form of proxy voting as unconstitutional, says he is researching ways to prevent a vote.) You can see the list of members who signed the discharge petition here.

Between 2000 and 2023, a total of two discharge petitions notched 218 signatures. But since 2024 alone, three bipartisan discharge petitions have succeeded, marking a notable string of Republican lawmakers teaming up with Democrats to go around their own leadership.

13 congresswomen in U.S. history have given birth while in office, including Luna, who gave birth to her son Henry in 2023, and Pettersen, who gave birth to her son Samuel in January. Both of them had to miss weeks of House votes afterward.