By: The Editorial Board – wsj.com – October 17, 2025

They won’t even vote to pass a military funding bill they supported in committee.

Democrats won’t vote for a stopgap measure to reopen the government, and on Thursday the Senate GOP tried another idea: Advancing a bill to fund the Defense Department for a full year. This is shrewd on both the merits and politics, and it’s instructive that Democrats scuttled a procedural vote 50-44. Three Democrats voted to advance the bill.

The biggest cost of a government shutdown is lost time and money for a U.S. military that needs new technology and more munitions. “A lot of stuff moves slower, a lot of stuff stops moving,” Palmer Luckey, founder of the defense technology company Anduril, lamented recently to reporters. Or as GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell put it after the vote: “Our adversaries are not standing still.”

An annual defense bill could end the dysfunction if it passes both houses, and the Senate measure cruised through committee with Democratic support, 26-3. Why not pass it? Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, who is the ranking Democrat on defense appropriations, on the Senate floor equated the need for “security for our nation from the threats that are greater than at any time in my adult life” with “security for our families from health care costs.”

In other words, Democrats won’t vote for their own bill to fund the troops unless the GOP gives billions of dollars in subsidies to health insurers. Republicans plan to pound Democrats for this politically, and they’ll have a substantive point.

GOP leader John Thune was exercised on the floor on Thursday afternoon: “If anything was needed to demonstrate just how fundamentally uninterested Democrats are in supporting our troops—and defending our country—just take a look at this vote.”

This isn’t a show of strength from Democrats. The party is accustomed to exploiting fears about health insurance to extract what they want from Republicans, but for once their crisis narrative isn’t breaking through. One reason is that President Trump produces a tsunami of other news every day.

Another reason is that Democrats have a weak case. The subsidies were supposed to be temporary pandemic support, and Democrats created the current expiration themselves in the Inflation Reduction Act. Republicans are wise to decline to pay the ransom—and keep taking roll calls that show they’re the reasonable party in Washington that wants to fund the troops and the government.

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Source: Senate Democrats Vote Against Defense – WSJ