Chuck Schumer Made the Right Call the Wrong Way

The thing is, Chuck Schumer was almost certainly correct: A government shutdown would have been worse, and allowed President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to accelerate their destruction of the federal government while saddling Democrats with blame for the crisis.

Yet by fumbling the politics of his decision to reluctantly get on board with the lesser evil of a terrible Republican budget bill, Schumer, the Senate minority leader, ended up doing unnecessary damage—to his own credibility and to his party’s already precarious image. “A lot of people are pissed off,” a Senate Democratic insider says. “I mean really pissed off.”

To review, briefly: On March 12, Schumer stood on the Senate floor and emphatically declared that “our caucus is unified” in opposing the budget bill passed by the House Republican majority, and that Democrats would instead attempt to negotiate a 30-day extension—an unlikely option, but one he felt important to pursue on behalf of senators who would need to make a difficult vote. The message seemed to be: Bring on the shutdown!

A number of moderate Democratic senators declared their intent to vote no on the budget bill, including Colorado’s John Hickenlooper, Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, and Virginia’s Tim Kaine and Mark Warner. Barely 24 hours after his “unified” oration, though, with Republicans rejecting the 30-day option, Schumer told stunned colleagues over lunch that he would instead vote for the Republican budget bill. Bring on the capitulation!

The sharp pivot set off plenty of public criticism. In Senate Democrat circles, Schumer’s rapid-fire publicity offensive explaining his thinking, including an appearance on Chris Hayes’s MSNBC show and a New York Times op-ed under Schumer’s byline, stoked suspicions that his initial opposition to the budget bill had been a head fake all along. (Schumer’s office denied that those media initiatives were preplanned.) At the end of the week, talking with Jake Tapper on CNN, Schumer tried to offer a clarification: “If you would have listened to my speech, I said we didn’t have the votes yet, but the Democrats preferred, and it would have been much better, and that’s what we were united on middle of the week: a 30-day [continuing resolution] extension where the appropriators could have gone to work.”

Democratic frustrations about how to best fight Trump have been splintered since Inauguration Day. By doing the responsible thing clumsily, Schumer instantly made himself the focus of all that outrage, even from allies. His turnaround provoked a blast from normally mild-mannered New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries (though the House minority leader may have been playing more to his own unhappy caucus).

Schumer had been scheduled to go on a promotional tour for his new book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning. Those events suddenly became potential magnets for protest and were canceled. Some interviews he’s conducted on fairly friendly turf have exposed Schumer to blunt criticism—Sunny Hostin on The View told him, “I think you and nine other Democrats caved.”

The harshest reactions, predictably, have come from the left. “You’ve got to get caught trying,” says Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something, a progressive PAC that supports younger candidates. “I think he has missed [that] concept.”

“What Trump’s doing is wildly unpopular,” Litman says, adding, “Generating conflict can help it break through. It’s a political strategy to fight back because it helps get attention on the unpopular shit. I think Schumer’s folding really was the nail in the coffin of the last generation of Democratic leaders. When he announced his vote, we saw a 200% increase in people coming to us looking up how to run for office. That’s not a coincidence.”

Peter Welch is plenty progressive. The Democratic senator from Vermont opposed the Republican budget bill clearly and consistently. And Welch doesn’t hesitate to describe Schumer’s turnaround as “a mistake…. It dispirited folks and it created this question of whether we’re unified.” Yet Welch believes there’s an upside to the pounding that Schumer has been taking. “I think he’s gotten the message that with this lawless rampage Trump is on, we’ve got to take more risks,” he says. “We have got to do things differently because we’re dealing with a very different president.”

Opportunities to fight more creatively and forcefully will present themselves soon enough. The controversial budget bill that just passed covers only the next six months of federal funding, and it included a $4 trillion debt ceiling increase that could be breached by mid-summer. Trump and the Republicans are also pursuing large tax and budget cuts that may threaten the future of Medicaid. Democratic senator Michael Bennet, in a Colorado town hall this week, tiptoed close to suggesting Schumer should step aside in advance of those battles. “I do think on the leadership question, it’s always better to, you know, examine whether folks are in the right place. And we’re certainly going to have that conversation,” Bennet said, responding to an audience member.

It wasn’t so long ago that Schumer was a Democratic hero, strategizing the 2020 races that won back a Senate majority, and then steering much of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure agenda through the upper chamber.

With his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose and his distinctly Brooklyn cadences, Schumer can be mockable, and lately he’s been taking some cheap shots, in addition to a lot of arrows for his fellow Democratic Party senators. Maybe, at 74 years old, he hasn’t lost any steps. But as Biden painfully demonstrated, lifelong politicians aren’t always the best judges of when it’s time for them to leave.