Last Thursday, one day ahead of the deadline to fund the government, Chuck Schumer announced that he and his cowardly band of Democratic Senators would prefer to act like this is all normal and go home for the weekend on Friday per usual. Instead of fighting an autocratic takeover of the United States federal government which already stripped Congress of its fundamental constitutional authority, Schumer rubber stamped the coup and literally signed on to a pro-Trump bill to fund the government without even bothering to extract any concessions from his so-called opposition. This left one federal worker to tell Splinter that “Chuck Schumer just gave all federal employees the bird and told us no help is coming from Congress.”
Schumer did, however, spend a day pretending to fight, as I chronicled after its culmination on Wednesday. An hour after I published a tepidly positive headline for Schumer, Talking Points Memo reported that rejecting the clean resolution that day was a trick to make Democratic voters think Senate Dems were resisting, and it was actually just a show to set up a doomed fight later for amendments. They knew these would never pass after they voted for the clean resolution, so the hope reportedly was that they could cynically take those amendments to voters and say, ‘see we tried.’
A government shutdown may have been the worst option. It would have allowed Trump and Musk to deem who is a non-essential worker, and functionally destroy more of the federal government. Musk reportedly wanted a shutdown, but the fact that Republicans pushed for a bill proved that despite its advantages, they did not want one. Trump clearly didn’t either since he signed the bill, and it likely had to do with widespread polling showing that Trump and the GOP would share the brunt of the blame for it. This is what people who aren’t Chuck Schumer call leverage, and his failure lies in his total lack of effort to utilize it over this bill that House Democrats nearly unanimously rejected.
This mess that betrayed his allies in House has left Schumer wholly isolated, even among people who have always backed him and unanimously reelected him to leadership a few months ago. His fellow New Yorker Hakeem Jeffries said “next question” when asked about a potential change in Senate leadership after Jeffries dug the knife out of his back, while vulnerable swing state Senator Raphael Warnock publicly hinted that the Democrats could have someone else leading them in 2026 and 2028. Signing on to this legislation that empowers Trump to truly unhinged degrees a day before the deadline is as clear of a surrender as it gets, and Schumer’s caucus has reacted accordingly.
In case anyone was confused over at least part of Schumer’s motivation to make a deal with Trump, Schumer also made rhetorical space for Trump’s lawless arrest of Mahmoud Khalil despite acknowledging that he did not know everything that happened. Keep in mind that before this interview with Chuck Schumer was published in the New York Times on Sunday, the Trump administration did not charge Khalil with a crime and is relying on an obscure 1952 provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives Marco Rubio sole power over departing legal residents for protected speech.
“I don’t know all the details yet. They’re trying to come out, and there’ll be a court case which will determine it. If he broke the law, he should be deported. If he didn’t break the law and just peacefully protested, he should not be deported. It’s plain and simple.”
The Trump administration is basically admitting that Khalil didn’t break the law by not charging him with a crime! What the fuck is this pro-fascism lie by America’s new preeminent doddering gerontocrat!? Schumer also made space in this NYT interview to approve of Trump’s illegal seizure of $400 million from Columbia University over America’s new McCarthyite purge of anyone who ever said a negative thing about a foreign country who totally doesn’t have a vice grip on both political parties right now.
“I say to some people, ‘If I were your age, I’d be protesting something or other.’ So I get that, and I love it, and it’s about America. But when it shades over to violence and antisemitism, the colleges had to do something, and a lot of them didn’t do enough. They shrugged their shoulders, looked the other way. Columbia among them. So what did they do? They took away $400 million. I’m trying to find out what they took away… My worry is that this $400 million was just done in typical Trump fashion: indiscriminately, without looking at its effect.”
Just so we’re clear: the Senate Minority Leader is saying there is a world where he is fine with an illegal arrest over a thought crime where the state has yet to charge Khalil, as well as a world where the president discriminately seizing $400 million from a university is acceptable because of peaceful student protests that Schumer’s stenographers have characterized as antisemitic.
In related news, new polling of the Democratic Party is out, and Schumer’s legacy is staring him right back in his face. This is 1852 Whig Party territory that he and his generation of abject failures have brought the Democrats into. They are not a viable national party right now.
Democratic party hits new low in popularity — only 27% view it favorably in a new NBC News poll
www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol…
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— Ben Goggin (@bengoggin.bsky.social) March 16, 2025 at 9:05 AM
Neville Chamberlain will be remembered more fondly than Chuck Schumer and this generation of spineless Democrats who betrayed the New Deal and Great Society. After the past week, it is crystal clear that for every nanosecond of his life this century, Schumer has been living in a universe that doesn’t exist. In retrospect, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a man who proudly tells everyone that he governs for a fictional middle-class family he invented is not tethered to the reality that the rest of us Americans share. Chuck Schumer was never built for this world. He is the avatar of the part of the Democratic Party who looks at politics as a TV show for comfortable old white people instead of a power struggle with people’s lives at stake.
Speaking of shows that don’t reflect reality, Chuck Schumer was supposed to be kicking off his book tour right now, but he has delayed it because he understands that everybody hates his guts, except for his imaginary friends the Baileys. In his perfect world he very clearly planned this moment for, Schumer would be spending his days helping President Harris pass similar McCarthyite laws protecting Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal Israeli regime from thought crimes by America’s youth, and his nights regaling the Baileys with tales of people who paid him to tell him how good his book was. Instead, Trump won, Schumer surrendered, and he is now forced to join the rest of us in this hellish reality and live in a book tour-less world, cowering from the populace he has failed his entire Senate career.
Discerning politicians’ motives in Washington is always tricky given the litany of known knowns and unknown unknowns and such, but here’s a thought: maybe the reason that Schumer capitulated to Trump in defiance of his entire House caucus and a significant chunk of his Senate one is because Schumer agrees with Trump, like he said he would this weekend if the conditions were right. Conditions that, per Trump’s own administration’s admission, do not exist and like the Baileys, Schumer invented out of whole cloth. The Democratic Senate Minority Leader liking what Trump is doing is a more straightforward explanation for Schumer’s actions, or lack thereof, than every other one at this point, save for the classic characterization of Democratic politicians that now per polling, is accepted as objective reality: they are a bunch of feckless cowards afraid to fight.
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