Chuck Schumer's Still Sure Chuck Schumer's Not The One Who F*cked Up Here

Oh Chuck.

Lord, grant us the strength to not start screaming every time Chuck Schumer opens his mouth and spills out gibberish in that stereotypical Brooklyn accent.

The Senate Minority Leader has spent the last few days taking fire from every direction over his caving in on passing a continuing resolution to keep the government open. Well, not every direction. Republicans are thrilled with him, as they have been anonymously telling reporters. Thanks, Chuck, for giving us everything we wanted is the general subtext of the quotes. Don’t let anyone tell you to grow a spine. We think you’re doing great!

Democrats, on the other hand, are hollering at Grandpa Zabar’s to step down from his leadership position and let someone with some actual fight in them take over. Someone who can speak clearly with a strong moral vision for the country. Someone who actually sees just how deep the rot is in the GOP, who understands that the Republican Party is not going to suddenly come to its senses.

People have been waiting for those scales to fall from Republican eyes for a few decades, and it is even more ridiculous a delusion after nearly ten years of Donald Trump. And yet, Chuck Schumer will still tell reporters that Republican senators keep sitting next to him on exercise bikes at the Senate gym and whispering, Oh, we hate the big orange lummox as much as you do, Chuck. But we’re hamstrung at the moment because our constituents love him and we are but simple hummingbirds buffeted about by the winds of history. Tell you what, check back with us in, like, 2027.

This is the heart of the Schumer problem: He is in denial that would make a therapist grasp her head in despair. He thinks it’s still 2004 in the Senate, when there were a few moderate Republicans and they could all hash out a bill or an issue congenially, like co-workers who respected each other, while chowing down on takeout salads and bragging about their kids.

In reality, it’s 2024 and the Senate is chock full of nihilistic dipshits who can't successfully work a doorknob without an aide or a wet nurse giving them directions. Tommy Tuberville is no John McCain, which is really saying something.

The depths of Schumer’s denial were pretty clear when he sat for an interview with Chris Hayes on Tuesday night. Schumer, who wore reading glasses the entire time in a perhaps misguided attempt to project the wisdom of age and experience, made the case for why he was right to keep the government open at this particular moment when the president has empowered a ketamine-addled billionaire to gleefully tear it up by the roots.

Schumer spent the first few minutes of the interview defending his specific reasons for not wanting a government shutdown even though the Democrats at that moment had maximum leverage to extract concessions from the GOP, which needed 60 votes to break a filibuster of the bill. That’s when Hayes got to the larger point that people are hollering, but which Chuck Schumer, at least publicly, fails to grasp:

“What I’m hearing from people, and there’s a lot of them, is right now a crisis is happening unlike anything the Republic has faced, even since the Civil War. Most Americans don’t quite grasp it. And it’s your job as the most powerful Democrat to use whatever tactics you have to communicate that. And by going along with this, you have missed your opportunity to tell the nation just how bad it is.”

Hayes went on to say that “there is nothing like a crisis” to make clear the stakes to the otherwise inattentive public. And a shutdown that results in what remains of government services stopping on a dime would certainly grab some attention.

Here is where Schumer keeps coming back to his old arguments and beliefs in a congenial Senate. It requires some contradictory thinking. On the one hand, the GOP right now is controlled by intransigent MAGA billionaires who would have welcomed a shutdown because they want to shut down the government anyway.

On the other hand, in the long term the real fight will be a few months down the road. That is when the Republicans will be trying to codify massive cuts to social programs like Medicaid in a giant reconciliation bill, and they will not be as unified as they are now. Then Democrats will be able to negotiate. And while they won’t be able to stop a lot of things, they can limit the damage while the courts continue rejecting every GOP argument.

So why would Schumer think the intransigent MAGA grip on the GOP will lessen over the next months? What is the basis for that? Well, Schumer argues, it worked in 2017, didn’t it? The Democrats limited the damage and then rode the wave to winning big in the 2018 midterms, didn’t they?

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But he just said that this is a different GOP than it has been in the past! And anyone who has watched the first eight weeks of this nightmare unfold has zero reason to think the Republicans will be less unified six months down the line. It was a surprise to many — including, by his own admission, Schumer — that the GOP stayed together to pass this continuing resolution to keep the government funded at levels approved under the Biden administration. So what are we even doing here?

Just to drive home the point, Hayes played for Schumer clips of various Democrats saying publicly but politely that he fucked up, and thus fucked his party and his country six ways from Sunday. They are welcome to quote us if they keep trying to get the Senate Minority Leader to see the light.

We weren’t done hearing about the depths of Schumer’s denial. On Wednesday, The Guardian reported on a new book written by reporters Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater in which the two interviewed Schumer before the 2024 election about his predictions for how everything would shake out:

“Here’s my hope … after this election, when the Republican party expels the turd of Donald Trump, it will go back to being the old Republican party.”

Schumer said that in June of 2023. His prognostication was, to put it mildly, off by a few degrees. He just didn’t want to face up to what he was seeing.

Or, as Wonkette OG Ana Marie Cox puts it:

Vivid! Thanks, OG.

Now, to be fair (ugh) to Schumer, there is a case to be made for his actions that is hard to fully explain during a spirited back and forth with Chris Hayes. Progressive commentator Martin Longman made it in a pretty good piece over the weekend, and while we were not convinced, it made some sense. More sense than Schumer has yet conveyed.

And Schumer may even be right! Maybe it will work out better if Democrats keep their powder dry for bigger fights down the road, assuming Trump has not banned the Democratic Party and deported its leaders by May. Which we wouldn’t put past him.

But at bottom, the problem remains the same. As Chris Hayes said, the Republic is facing its biggest crisis in at least a few generations. Such a crisis requires a fighting spirit to really fully express its depths, to rally the public, and to stand up and kick Republicans in the dick, metaphorically speaking.

Chuck Schumer just isn’t that guy. He’s a kindly old man who sounds like he runs his family’s camera store in Midtown. Which is fine if you want a deal on a solid digital camera with a multi-focal lens. It is significantly less fine when the nation is in need of leadership.

[YouTube / The Guardian / Progress Pond]

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