Ten Senate Democrats joined with most of their GOP colleagues on Friday to advance a government funding bill, averting a partial shutdown of major federal services beginning at midnight.

The 62-38 vote came amid a brewing trade war between President Donald Trump and international allies and the administration’s mass layoffs of federal workers, and where any additional signs of U.S. political dysfunction would only add to the economic uncertainty.
Just over an hour later, the bill formally passed the Senate with a 54-46 vote, mostly along party lines. Trump is expected to sign it into law before the midnight deadline. Republicans, who control the Senate 53-47, needed Democratic help first to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to bypass the filibuster.

Democrats were stuck between two choices they despised: Vote for a funding bill that reflects Republican spending priorities and will give Trump and his allies more leeway to dismantle the federal government, or shut the government down by denying their vote and risk facing political backlash and blame.
After days of waffling and demanding a shorter-term funding extension that Republicans rejected, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., tipped the scales.

He announced Thursday night that he would vote to support the GOP funding bill, despite strong opposition from the Democratic base, arguing that the consequences of a shutdown would be “much, much worse” than the funding extension.
Schumer made the case on the Senate floor that a shutdown would allow the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers to “cherry pick which parts of the government to reopen,” giving them even more power over the federal government they have sought to remake.

“If we go into a shutdown, and I told my caucus this, there’s no offramp,” he told reporters Thursday night. “How you stop a shutdown would be totally determined by the Republican House and Senate, and that is totally determined, because they’ve shown complete blind obeisance, by Trump.”

Ultimately, more than enough Democrats joined Schumer in voting against forcing a shutdown. The bill would fund the government through the end of September, boosting defense spending by $6 billion and reducing non-defense spending by $13 billion.