Senate Democrats are bracing for a painful post-mortem as they try to avoid a September rerun of their latest government funding defeat.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, and nine of his members helped get a House GOP-authored government funding bill to the finish line, saying a vote to advance legislation they loathed was the least bad option. The alternative, they argued, was allowing a shutdown that could empower President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to accelerate their slashing of the federal bureaucracy.

This was the first time since the start of Trump’s second administration that the party had real leverage to fight the president, as Republicans needed Democratic votes to overcome a filibuster. Democrats could have refused to put up those votes to avert a shutdown, but Schumer folded instead. This gambit is now raising internal questions about how Democrats will handle the next shutdown deadline at the end of September — and how they can avoid the same result.