Nevada senator explains break with fellow Democrats on shutdown

As the partial government shutdown continues and there is no end in sight, Catherine Cortez Masto is ready to end it Right now.

The lawyer senator from Nevada is one of two Democrats who have repeatedly voted, along with Republicans and Maine’s independent senator Angus King, to keep the federal government running.

With his dissent, he not only challenges his colleagues in the Senate, but also puts himself squarely at odds with the galvanizing impulse of his party’s political base: Stop Trump! Don’t give any quarters! Now is the time! This fight!

There is not even the slightest doubt in Cortez Masto.

“I have been very consistent about the cost of the shutdown, the impact it will have on Americans, and the fact that I believe we need to work in a bipartisan way to address what we are seeing now, which is the looming health care crisis,” said Cortez Masto of Washington.

“And I think we can do that by keeping the government open. I don’t think we should do that by trading the pain of one group of Americans for another.”

Unlike other defectors of the Democrats, Pennsylvania’s quirky Senator John FettermanCortez Masto did not gain a reputation for partisan heresy or for antagonizing fellow party members by playing tricks with President Trump and the MAGA movement.

Despite his tentative alliance with the GOP, he is generous in his criticism of the president and Republicans’ stance on healthcare, the issue at the heart of the shutdown fight.

“Of course we need to oppose Trump’s attacks on our families and our country,” he said. “I am one of the most vocal opponents of Trump’s disastrous trade and tariff policies.”

He argued that his differences with fellow Democrats were instrumental, not extraneous.

Cortez Masto insisted it was entirely possible to keep the government open for business while also working through the parties’ differences on health care, including ending subsidies that keep insurance costs from rising rapidly.

According to Cortez Masto, it comes down to negotiation, trust and compromise, and this is still possible even in a time of fanatical partisanship.

“This is what Congress was built on,” he said. “Congress is about compromise, we work together across the aisle to get things done. I still believe that.”

Although he himself said – in rather minimal terms – that “there are those in the management and some of my colleagues who do not agree with this view.”

Not to mention the numerous Democratic activists who believe that anything short of jailing Trump and sending the entire GOP-run Congress to a remote desert island amounts to cowardly capitulation.

Nevada, where Cortez Masto was born and raised, is a Republican-red state for a very long time, then turned blue for a while starting with the Barack Obama administration in 2008. It turned red again in 2024 during the Trump era.

Cortez Masto, a former state attorney general, was elected to the Senate in 2016, replacing Senate majority leader Harry Reid for the first time since the Democrat retired.

When Cortez Masto sought re-election six years later, he was viewed as the most endangered incumbent among Democrats. He wasn’t as strong or as prominent as Reid. Inflation was soaring, and Nevada was still suffering from the economic crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

His opponent was middling Republican Adam Laxalt, an unsuccessful candidate for governor and one of the architects of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. He also appeared to have a soft spot for the rioters on January 6, 2021.

Still, Cortez Masto barely beat him by fewer than 10,000 votes out of more than 1 million. In retrospect, this result could be seen as a harbinger of Trump’s success in keeping the state afloat after losing Nevada twice.

Cortez Masto’s next goal is to be re-elected in 2028, which is a very long time in political terms. By then the shutdown will be long forgotten. (And it’s probably already over.)

He said the focus is on the here and now and the economic impact of the closure, especially at a time when Nevada is already feeling the negative consequences of Trump’s trade and immigration policies. Tourism-dependent Las Vegas has experienced a significant recession, and Cortez Masto suggested the shutdown would make things worse.

But that didn’t deter Nevada’s other U.S. senator, Jacky Rosen, who repeatedly voted with nearly all Democrats to keep the government shut down until Republicans relented.

“Nevadans sent me here to fight on their behalf,” Rosen told the Senate. “Not going into the cave.”

To the question about the rift, Cortez Masto responded evenly and diplomatically. “He’s a good friend… Our goal is to fight for Nevada and that’s what we’re doing,” he said. “We both do it in different ways.”

So negotiation. Bipartisanship. To agree.

What makes you think Trump, who has been harshly criticized by Congress and the courts, can be trusted to honor whatever deal Democrats make with Republicans to reopen the government and address the health crisis he sees, Cortez Masto said?

“That’s actually the problem, isn’t it? We know what you’re doing,” he replied. He “ignores the law when it comes to taking on the role of legislator and allocating funds at will… So of course not, you can’t trust him.

“But it’s there. What you need to understand is how to work with your Republican colleagues to get something done.”

Cortez Masto dryly noted that Congress was essentially a separate branch of government with its own power and authority. Republicans left both to Trump, he said, and if they really want to fix the problems and do more than the president orders, “they need to go out and pass bipartisan legislation to push back on this administration.”

“We have to manage,” Cortez Masto said. “We must work together.”

Wouldn’t that be something?