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It’s no secret that Congress is a pretty miserable place to work these days. Republicans are unwilling to cross a president who demands their loyalty, offers none in return, and is happy to make or break careers at whim. Democrats, meanwhile, are furious with their colleagues across the aisle, who continue to demonstrate they’d rather bow to Trump than preserve their own constitutional powers. And yet, even by those standards, Congress was an especially toxic workplace last week.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, both parties had a chance to walk back from the brink. Instead, shouts echoed across the House floor following a moment of silence for Kirk, and some Republicans, including Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, Derrick Van Orden, and Nancy Mace, have outright blamed the media and Democrats for his murder. At the same time, instead of striking a bipartisan deal to advance the president’s nominees, lawmakers in the Senate fought bitterly over the process. Meanwhile, there’s only about two weeks to go until government funding runs out. None of this bodes well for negotiations to avoid a shutdown.

The drama surrounding the process for confirming Trump’s nominees escalated on Thursday. Democrats have tried to make Trump’s confirmations as painful as possible by putting candidates through an achingly slow, one-by-one process that eats up an enormous amount of floor time. Republicans, meanwhile, had been threatening a Senate rule change to speed up the process, a step that would inevitably whittle away any remaining comity in the chamber.

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There were paths that emerged at the last minute to avoid this. Republican Sen. James Lankford and independent Sen. Angus King proposed a deal that would allow the Senate to pass 15 nominees at a time, except for judges and cabinet officials, that had all cleared the same Senate committee. There was also a proposed side deal, in which Republicans would protect the cherished “blue slip” tradition that gives home-state senators approval over judicial nominees, and prevent recess appointments, which presidents use to bypass Senate confirmation altogether. (Trump wants to get rid of the blue slip process and make recess appointments possible.)

These deals would have been a rare moment of dealmaking and goodwill in the chamber, and demonstrated that Republicans were willing to protect some Senate authority from Trump’s demands. They also would have shown that members from both parties are still willing to find middle ground despite pressure from their base. “If we can win the day on this, it’ll be a good day for America,” Alabama Sen. Katie Britt told me when the Lankford-King deal seemed within reach. “And America needs a good day.”

Instead, after a day of intense negotiations, the Senate’s compromise framework fell apart: Chuck Schumer didn’t trust a handshake agreement over blue slips, and pushed to delay a move on the rules until Monday. John Thune, suspecting a delay tactic, and not trusting Schumer to deliver support from his caucus, called time. “The good idea fairy will start to circulate around here and we’ll have a whole bunch more conversations and nothing will get done,” Thune angrily said on the Senate floor.

In the end, Republican Senators were so angry at Schumer that all 53 of them—even those skeptical of altering Senate procedure—voted to advance a Senate rules change that, via a new framework, would allow dozens of unrelated nominees to get confirmed at the same time. It was another low point in a series of low points in the Senate. “We are getting more and more mad with each other over things large and small, things the president’s doing, things that we’re not doing,” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, who was involved in the negotiations, told me. When asked about the alternative routes not taken, he said: “I think it might have contributed to a healthier environment.”

Once again, some within the Democratic caucus are frustrated with Schumer for not being better prepared. Several Democrats pointed out that Thune had been threatening to change Senate rules since July, which should have given Schumer plenty of time to negotiate a deal—or, at least, have a counterproposal ready to go. “If I were Schumer, I’d be aware that anything we get in a deal is going to be an improvement over what they’ve been trying to shove down our throats all week,” one Democratic aide said. But Democrats on Schumer’s side doubt that Thune would ever have agreed to a deal, pointing out that he had enough Republican votes.

Schumer has been on his back heels since he fumbled the government funding fight in March. Democrats then were exasperated that Schumer didn’t have a plan or a demand in response to Republicans’ efforts to jam him on a government funding bill. Schumer has been working to ensure he doesn’t make the same mistakes again as Congress is on the precipice of another government funding fight.

Republicans are expected to push a partisan short-term government funding extension until November as early as this week, while Democrats are insisting that any stopgap should include measures to reduce healthcare costs. Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries announced this week that they wouldn’t vote for a short-term government funding bill unless Republicans “meet with us in a true bipartisan negotiation to satisfy the American people’s needs on healthcare.”

Obviously, there is scant indication that will happen. Late last week, Trump told Fox that Republicans shouldn’t “even bother dealing with” Democrats, and Thune told Punchbowl that he has no intention of striking a healthcare deal with Democrats for the sake of a stopgap funding measure. Separately, the Appropriations Committees have been working behind the scenes to preserve what’s left of the government funding process—in theory, the government is supposed to be funded through 12 separate appropriations bills crafted by the various appropriations subcommittees—but that process is fraying, too, despite the futile efforts of the leaders of the Appropriations Committees, including Sen. Susan Collins, to make it work, or make it seem like it’s working.

The battle playing out in the Homeland Security subcommittee, where Sen. Chris Murphy is the ranking Democrat, is instructive: He is simply refusing to vote for the funding bill, or any other funding bills, that the committee has produced. Murphy and the subcommittee’s top Republican, Sen. Katie Britt, have been at odds all year over Homeland Security funding, including a public spat on the Senate floor earlier this year. Murphy is protesting the Trump administration’s use of rescissions to claw back congressionally approved funds, and says he will not fund masked ICE agents indiscriminately picking Hispanic people off the street. He also argues that D.H.S. already got a $150 billion infusion through the One Big Beautiful Bill—50 percent more than its roughly $100 billion annual budget—and is now paying local police salaries through the 287(g) program to deputize officers for immigration enforcement. One Democratic aide argued to me that this violates federal law, which explicitly requires state and local governments—not Washington—to bear those costs. (D.H.S. did not respond to requests for comment.)

All these little fires are hard to put out, but even more difficult to rebuild from.

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