Savor fresh recipes, cooking hacks and laughs with chef and culinary legend Prue Leith as she welcomes you into her Cotswold home. Stream this series and 100+ food programs on OPB Passport!
On Friday, House Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine other Democratic U.S. Senators voted in favor of a bill crafted by House Republicans to fund the government through September. Oregon U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley was one of many Congressional Democrats who opposed bringing the stopgap funding bill to a vote, even if it risked Democrats being blamed for a government shutdown.
Meanwhile, Sen. Merkley has been hearing from constituents who have been showing up at town halls that he and other members of Oregon’s Congressional delegation have been holding across the state. Attendees have voiced concerns about possible cuts to Medicaid as the Trump administration continues its efforts to cut the federal workforce and dismantle the core duties of agencies such as the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Sen. Merkley spoke with OPB’s “Think Out Loud.” The following highlights from the conversation have been edited for length and clarity.
“We knew that Trump had been lobbying the House to make sure there was not a shutdown because he had been hurt by a shutdown before, and because he said it would shut down DOGE [the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency]. He had his vice president lobbying against the shutdown as well. So given that experience and given that the polling showed that independents by a 29% margin already were blaming Republicans for a potential shutdown, the fear that Democrats would be blamed was just way out of sync with the facts.
“If we were going back to the floor every two hours and saying, ‘Unanimous consent, open the government for 30 days to pass a bipartisan bill, that’s what America wants.’ We would have seen the Republicans voting against opening up the government time after time, multiple times a day. It would have really reinforced the instinct that people already had because they can see that Republicans control the Oval Office, the House and the Senate. So it’s natural to blame the party in power.
“The worse the shutdown is, the more the American people would rally against it, the more pressure the Republicans would feel, the faster they’d come back to the table. Listen, when you are in a fight with a bully, you can decide to run and hide or you can decide to take them on. What we know about the world and watching the disintegration of republics around the world is that when you hand more power to the executive hoping that you can fight them later, the problem is they have more power later.”
U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley speaks during a town hall held at the Federal Building in Portland, Ore., March 17, 2025. The event aimed to provide an opportunity for federal employees to talk about the impact of layoffs in the federal government.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
“We are very concerned about the firing of employees. We’re very concerned about funds being withheld. There’s an enormous amount of depression among those who are working at the Environmental Protection Agency. We really saw that they were a prime target in Trump administration number one. They were also a prime target in Project 2025 that Russell Vogt was the architect of, and he would say, ‘Hey, I want to make sure that all of our employees for the government just feel terrible, feel like they are villains’. … There’s been a whole series of proposals put forward to reverse protections. Those proposals will go through a public comment period, so they’re draft, then they’ll become final. We will fight them at every step.”
“The core architecture is to create an imperial presidency, to create a strongman presidency, to ignore the laws that are written as to behavior. For example, the laws say you can’t fire inspector generals without a month’s notice and cause, but the administration fired 17 or 18 inspector generals. They didn’t care that they were violating the law as written. They’re impounding funds without caring about the fact that that’s unconstitutional. In fact, Russell Vought’s goal, the head of [the Office of Management and Budget] and the architect of Project 2025, he wants to put this in the hands of the Supreme Court and have the Supreme Court say, ‘You know what, we see the Constitution differently than any other court has ever seen it, and we’re going to give the president a lot more power to suspend funds or or move funds between departments.’
“The reason we’re concerned about the court and the reason Russell Vogt is hopeful is last year they found some invisible ink in the Constitution. That invisible ink said – despite what the founders’ vision was and despite what the apparent writing is in in the Constitution – they discovered that the president is immune from committing a crime as long as he calls it a government act, which means that he could kill you, Dave Miller, and as long as he writes a writ saying this is a government act, he is completely immune from prosecution. This should terrify people. … And then if the Supreme Court weighs in and finds new invisible ink in the Constitution that creates this imperial presidency, our republic is in deep, deep trouble. It’s going to take massive citizen action producing a very different outcome the next elections if we’re going to save our country.”
“Member after member of the Republican caucus will say something along the lines of, ‘I know what he’s doing is despicable. But the majority of my base loves what they’re hearing.’ And what they’re hearing is straight off Fox News and groups to the right of that that are saying, ‘Hey, he’s doing nothing wrong. He’s using, you know, the power of the presidency in aggressive fashion to accomplish the things he campaigned on.’ They’re hearing that in their social media, they’re hearing that on cable television, they’re hearing that from their friends who are watching the same media that they’re watching. And that development where we have these separate media bubbles in America is a huge problem for democracy.
“You think about the town square where we can envision the founders coming, the communities getting together and arguing out cases. There was no algorithm. Everybody got to have their say, everybody got to hear what everyone else was saying. But now people hear some stuff that kind of creates two different visions of the universe and creates a big separation between the blue team and the red team and a demonization of each. And then it’s social media. The algorithms mean that people get fed the stuff that they’re already looking at and there’s enormous power in that in suppressing dialogue. And so we really have a problem about having a national conversation about where we’re headed, and it reinforces the challenge for Republican Senators to take on the president.”
Democratic Oregon U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley spoke to “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller. Click play to listen to the full conversation:
Tags: Think Out Loud
Stand with OPB and protect independent journalism for everyone.
Streaming Now
BBC The Global Story
