Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is facing the biggest revolt from Democrats in years, but in a conversation with The Interview after his crucial vote supporting a Republican federal spending bill this past week, he tried to brush off questions about whether he should step aside. Democratic officials appeared stunned when Schumer did an about-face on the spending bill, arguing that the choice was the lesser of two evils. Schumer defended his decision in the second part of our wide-ranging interview, even as questions over his leadership by senior party officials continued.
Here are three takeaways from the shutdown portion of our conversation.
Schumer explained that he cast his vote to prevent further decimation of the government by DOGE and Trump.
Schumer said that he made a “very, very difficult” decision to support the Republican bill in order to avert a government shutdown that, he said, President Trump and Elon Musk wanted. He called Trump and Musk “anti-government fanatics” and “nihilists.”
They want to shutter “agency after agency,” he said, which would create a situation far worse than the Republican bill. He continued:
Two days from now in a shutdown, they could say, well, food stamps for kids is not essential. It’s gone. All veterans offices in rural areas are gone. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. They’re not essential. We’re cutting them back. So it’d be horrible. The damage they can do under a shutdown is much worse than any other damage that they could do.
Isn’t this just — Wait, let me just finish, Lulu. It can last forever. There is no off ramp. One of the Republican senators told us: We go to a shutdown, it’s going to be there for six months, nine months, a year. And by then, their goal of destroying the federal government would be gone. And finally, one final point here, and that is that right now under the C.R., you can go to court and contest an executive order to shut something down. Under a shutdown, the executive branch has sole power.
He acknowledged that he and Hakeem Jeffries haven’t spoken since the vote.
While he accepted that there were “divisions” within his party around his vote, he insisted that he and his fellow Democrats have a respect for each other and that they are united in their fight against Trump.
Schumer reluctantly acknowledged that he and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who talk often, have not spoken since Schumer’s surprising vote, suggesting that there is a rupture between the two most senior Democrats in Congress.
Here is that portion of our exchange:
Hakeem Jeffries seemed to throw you under the bus on Friday. He was asked directly if he thought you should be replaced as leader, and he very pointedly refused to answer that question. Have you spoken to Jeffries since the vote? I speak to Jeffries regularly.
Have you spoken to him since the vote? He and I have a good relationship. We speak all the time.
But have you spoken since the vote? No, we haven’t spoken since the vote, but we speak all the time. We speak regularly, and we have a good, close relationship.
He thinks he’s still the right leader for the party.
The divisions in the party about how to face down Donald Trump exploded into view with Schumer’s vote, placing his leadership into jeopardy.
In both conversations with me, Schumer made clear that, despite broad concerns from some that Democrats are operating with an old playbook, and specific concerns about his own leadership surrounding the shutdown vote, he’s still the right person to be Senate minority leader. In our first conversation, he said that he sees himself as “sort of like an orchestra leader,” and when pressed on this in our second conversation, he dismissed the idea that he wasn’t the man for the job, saying “We are a united and strong caucus fighting against Trump.”
Furious Democrats have even called for fellow New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to challenge Schumer in the next primary. When I pointed out that Schumer had been a leading voice in calls for Biden to step down, and asked if it was time for him to step down, he insisted that the Democrats were in a “spirited disagreement.”
Senator, you were crucial in getting President Joe Biden to step down. Do you think it’s time for you to do the same? Let me say this: There is spirited disagreement on which was the right vote. But as I said, I think we have mutual respect in our caucus, and we are all united, no matter how people voted on this vote, to continue fighting Trump. We are a united and strong caucus fighting against Trump. We disagreed on this issue, but that doesn’t diminish in any way how we’re going to fight every step of the way against Trump. And I believe that we’re going to have some real successes.
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