“And people are going to get hurt by a government that’s … lawless, because if you can’t speak your mind in this country without repercussions, that comes with a cost as well.”Bernie Sanders, the progressive independent senator who caucuses with the Democrats and convened the live stream, reminded viewers: “You have a president who doesn’t believe in the constitution, doesn’t believe in the rule of law, lies all of the time.”The Senate is the arena for this fight because the 60-vote threshold required for most legislation to advance gives Democrats leverage they lack in the House of Representatives. The party could have made this stand in March, when government funding last expired, but the Democratic leader Chuck Schumer balked, leading to a substantial backlash from its base.Schumer is onboard this time, and so are the groups that rally his voters – a fact noted with some bitterness by Republicans on Tuesday night, after the parties blocked each other’s plans to continue funding.“Senate Democrats have sacrificed the American people to Democrats’s partisan interests. I hope it will be some comfort for Americans dealing with shuttered government services to know that MoveOn.org and other far-left organizations are happy with this vote,” the Senate majority leader, John Thune, said.Previous shutdowns have seen federal workers go unpaid and services the public relies on – such as government offices and national parks – close down.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s bureaucrat-averse office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, has vowed to make this shutdown even more damaging by using it as an opportunity to fire government employees – something the administration has already been doing since January.Yet there are already signs that Democrats are nervous about that threat.