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Rep. Pete Aguilar paused when he heard the question: Can House Democrats trust Senate Democrats in future legislative knife fights? His response: turn to a joke.
"There's the old adage in D.C. that Republicans are the opposition and sometimes the Senate is the enemy," the California Democrat told reporters Friday morning.
That political gallows humor summed up the conclusion of a three-day issues retreat in Leesburg, Virginia, where House Democrats spent much of their time complaining about Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) for giving in and allowing a vote on the GOP's bare-bones bill funding federal agencies.
The uproar prompted House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) to trek back 35 miles to the Capitol to hold an impromptu news conference Friday a couple of hours ahead of the Senate vote, urging Senate Democrats to buck Schumer.
Asked to defend Schumer's leadership, Jeffries passed. "Next question," he said. Jeffries ducked several more questions on camera about Schumer, then several more from reporters leaving the press room.
The unusually public split between the two Brooklyn Democrats created a fissure that leaves the party weakened as it heads into more serious legislative and legal battles against President Donald Trump and Republicans.
The Democrat-on-Democrat disputes continued throughout the weekend and have overshadowed what had been a politically successful effort to portray the short-term and long-term GOP agenda as something that would severely hurt working Americans.
Trump's polling numbers, particularly on his handling of the economy, have dropped just as steadily as the financial markets have plummeted amid fear of trade wars.
Republicans must now turn to the much more difficult task of crafting a massive bill that Trump wants to include border security, massive tax cuts and deep spending reductions that would probably touch popular entitlement programs such as Medicaid despite denials by GOP lawmakers.
That effort will be able to pass on a budgetary fast-track with only GOP votes, but the House's historically tight margin - Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) can only spare two votes from his side at the moment - will make this task a very heavy lift.
Republicans from swing districts were able to vote for the resolution starting this process because it was just an outline and didn't include specific, politically painful cuts. In a few months, those cuts will be detailed and, assuming Democrats can unify and hammer home a message, these Republicans will be under heavy pressure to oppose the plan.
Also, later this spring the Treasury Department will run out of accounting gimmicks and hit its debt limit for borrowing to finance the federal government, requiring Congress to pass a law extending that national line of credit. Such legislation will almost certainly require Democratic votes in the House, where a few dozen far-right conservatives traditionally refuse to vote to lift the debt ceiling. The Senate's 60-vote filibuster rules will require a bipartisan vote there.
Until Democrats forge unity again, those battles are going to be undermined, especially considering how personal some of the invective became in the past three days.
"Anyone who votes for this bill, on the Senate side, is going to be complicit in transferring a whole bunch of power from Congress to the executive branch," Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) told reporters Friday morning.
"Among the material devastation to everyday people, Senate Dems have now blown a hole in their ability to work with the House," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) wrote late Friday on social media.
Aguilar told reporters that Senate Democrats knew what their House counterparts were up to when they rallied 212 of 213 members to vote against the bill Tuesday.
"They have known exactly what we were doing. And so that's why I think the statement from Leader Schumer was a little surprising," he said.
Nine other members of Schumer's caucus joined him on the key vote that advanced the funding bill, choking off a filibuster that would have led to a shutdown of federal agencies. From Schumer's caucus, only Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) and Angus King (I-Maine) joined 52 of 53 Republicans in supporting the final vote. Sen. Rand Paul (Kentucky) was the only Republican vote against.
In an interview Friday with The Washington Post's Liz Goodwin, Schumer explained that he and Jeffries had hoped that Johnson would fail to deliver the votes to pass the bill out of the House.
But Trump cracked the whip so hard on House conservatives that just one Republican opposed it, sending the bill to the Senate, where, Schumer said, Democrats would get blamed for the shutdown if they filibustered.
"We had hoped that maybe Johnson couldn't get the votes," Schumer told The Post, explaining that predicament. "It put us in a very, very tough place."
Hope, as any smart coach will tell you, is not a strategy.
The March 14 funding deadline had been known as a key moment of potential leverage, once Johnson refused to pass all the spending bills in December to appease conservatives. That assured him enough support to narrowly win the vote on Jan. 3 for House speaker.
But the Trump-infused distractions took over even before he was sworn in on Jan. 20, with controversial Cabinet choices that Schumer tried to defeat.
Once Johnson began moving the very conservative budget outline, the Jeffries leadership team focused like a laser on the undefined $880 billion in cuts recommended from the committee overseeing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
At the same time, Elon Musk and his team started massive federal job cuts that have sparked protests across the country and galvanized what had been a much more reserved liberal reaction to Trump compared with the self-proclaimed resistance movement of early 2017.
With all these distractions, leadership left the negotiations over the government funding plan to the leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations committees.
Senate Democrats did not hold a full caucus meeting focused on the funding debate until Tuesday, a couple of hours before House Republicans narrowly passed their plan and just three days before the shutdown deadline.
During his Friday news conference at the Capitol, Jeffries predicted that Democrats would have won a shutdown fight just as they did against Republicans during the mid-1990s over GOP attempts to cut Medicare; in 2013 over saving the Affordable Care Act; and in 2019 over preventing Trump from diverting funds to build a border wall.
"Check the history. We're on the right side of the American people," he said.
But this time, Democrats never focused the negotiation on any single issue or demand.
A few weeks ago, they wanted some formal agreement that Musk would stand down and allow congressionally approved funding to remain intact; a week or so ago, they started demanding a four-week extension of current government funding for more time to draft the full-year budgets for agencies.
None of those political punches landed, so Johnson just plowed ahead with his partisan approach.
In the past few days, after Musk's efforts led to layoffs and closures of some Social Security offices, smart Democrats focused on defending that program.
Once Schumer made the decision to tactically retreat, however, he had lost track of just how angry liberal voters have been over what Trump and Musk are doing.
Voting "yes" to end debate and allow the GOP-drafted, Trump-blessed bill to pass became a politically toxic move for him. There was nothing in it that appealed to Senate Democrats, who last year were still in the majority and had drafted spending outlines for agencies that got swept aside. The legislation nixed tens of billions in earmarks for local projects that lawmakers from both parties planned to include.
All they would get is grief from their base, so the only Democrat up for reelection in 2026 who voted "yes" was Sen. Dick Durbin (Illinois), who turned 80 in November and has not said whether he will run for another term.
That meant Schumer would have to show leadership and vote for the bill himself and lean on his closest allies - such as two former chairs and the current chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee - to help get the procedural measure advanced over the 60-vote threshold.
In Leesburg on Thursday evening, Schumer became a four-letter word among House Democrats, who were stunned he took a lead role in passing the bill.
By Friday morning, Aguilar and Lieu convened an unplanned news conference solely to criticize Schumer and Senate Democrats.
Aguilar even said that House Democrats, going forward, are the only possible check on Trump.
"It's going to continue to be on us over these next 20 months to truly stand for the American people and to win in 2026 and to provide a check to Donald Trump," he said. "It's even more important today than it might have been on Wednesday."