from WNYC studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday,

September 12th. 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. 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.

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