Civics 101
The government of the United States consists of three separate but co-equal branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial.
Article I of the Constitution sets out the structure and powers of the legislative branch: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” Delineating these legislative powers, Section 9 reads:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law…
This is the explicit grant to the legislative branch — Congress, consisting of the Senate and House of Representatives — of the “power of the purse.”
The power of the purse in action
The federal budget for fiscal year 2025 ran from October 1, 2024, to September 30, 2025. The federal government operated under a full-year continuing resolution (the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act) passed in March 2025, which extended the 2024 budget — signed into law by President Biden on September 30, 2023 — for the whole 2025 fiscal year, with limited changes.
With the end of the fiscal year approaching, the House of Representatives passed the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2026 (H.R. 5371) on September 19. The bill is what is known as a “clean” continuing resolution (CR), meaning it is free from policy riders and largely maintains funding from fiscal year 2025. It passed on a 217-212 vote. The Act got 216 Republican and one Democratic vote for, and two Republican and 210 Democratic votes against. But, as a simple majority was all that was required for passage, the bill went to the Senate.
In the Senate, 60 votes are required for passage and the bill failed to get them in its first vote on September 19 (Democrats refuse to pass the bill until Republicans agree to extend yet again “temporary” tax credits created in 2021 which Democrats voted in 2022 to have expire in 2025). On October 1, with hours to go until the expiration of the budget and a shutdown of the federal government, the bill passed the Senate, but with only 55 votes in favor. Fifty-two Republicans, two Democrats, and one independent voted for passage, and 43 Democrats, one Republican, and one independent against. As a result, the federal budget expired at midnight, and the federal government shut down.
The bill has now failed to get the necessary 60 votes on thirteen occasions. Most recently — Tuesday — it got 52 Republican, one Democratic, and one independent vote for passage and 43 Democratic — including Minnesota’s two Senators, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith — one Republican, and one independent vote against, for 54-45. The federal government thus remains shut down.
Save us, King…from ourselves
Consider, again, Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution. The federal government does not currently have a budget. No “Appropriations [have been] made by Law” thus “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury.” It is the legislative branch to which the Constitution delegates the power of the purse, and it is in the legislative branch which the current situation revolving around that power must be resolved. Until that time, the rest of the government is left twiddling its thumbs.
But having voted the country into this situation, Democrats now want President Trump to bail them out. The federal government does not have the funds necessary to make SNAP payments this weekend. Democratic Senators — including Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith — could solve that problem immediately by voting to pass the CR. Instead, they have a gaggle of state Attorney Generals — including Minnesota’s Keith Ellison — suing the Trump administration to make the payments anyway…somehow. Now that stuff is about to get real, Democrats want to find a way to keep the government shut down without anyone feeling the adverse consequences: they want to have their shut down and eat it.
To get this political cover, they are demanding, in short, that the legislative branch — the President — usurp the power of the purse delegated to the legislative branch in Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution. They are demanding that President Trump actually does act like a king by exercising, in fact, a power the king of England hasn’t had in over two centuries.
My colleague, Bill Walsh, often expounds on the political folly of shutting down government and the current situation illustrates why. “The only way to win is not to play,” as a computer once wisely said.
Besides that lesson, the current situation illustrates the deep insincerity of the “No Kings” rhetoric of not two weeks ago. Many of those people are not, in fact, opposed to the notion of a king. Indeed, many of them would very much like one — or worse — if only that king was doing things they approved of, like usurping the power of the purse delegated by the Constitution to the legislative branch simply to wriggle them out of a political jam they voted themselves into.
Will the President oblige? For the sake of the Constitution, we must hope not.
