It's the Brian Larris show on WNYC. Good Friday morning, everyone.

And as we sit here on a Friday, a big and possibly historic decision is looming in less than three weeks for the Democratic Party,

particularly Democrats in the U.S. Senate. If it sounds familiar, it should. It's a decision

very much like the one in March over whether to shut down the government by refusing to go

along with a Republican budget bill. But many see the stakes as about more than just what to spend money on,

rather as having implications for American democracy itself.

I'm sure you remember when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said this in March,

as he decided not to block a stopgap funding measure called a continuing resolution or a CR.

While the CR bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse.

That decision and that vote brought a wave of cause for Schumer to resign

as the Democratic leader, as most of you know, in favor of someone with more willingness to fight

the Trump agenda by more dramatic and possibly more risky means. Now, the stopgap budget that

passed expires at the end of this month. The new fiscal year for the federal government begins October 1st. The same decision, or a very similar one, looms for Senate Democrats again, with so much more that the White House has done since March, right, from deploying the military on U.S. soil to firing the head of the Bureau of Labor

Statistics when the president didn't like the numbers, they made him look bad, to pushing Texas

to gerrymander in mid-decade to stack the deck for next year's midterms, plus actual budgetary

things like withholding $5 billion of already approved foreign aid, Trump's unilateral hold,

if you miss this, approved by the Supreme Court this week, at least for now.

And something happened yesterday in the Senate that you also might not have heard with all the

coverage of Charlie Kirk dominating the news,

something that happened in the Senate yesterday that might contribute to pushing Schumer to a new

view of things and also might be pushing congressional democracy to a new brink.

As the New York Times puts it, Senate Republicans used what is known as the nuclear option

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