Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is in hot water with Democrats after voting with Republicans to end Senate debate on the most recent government funding bill. His leadership position is in the crosshairs of a mob of his own making, driven by his failure to confront extremism in his own party.
Schumer and other Democratic leaders were caught sleeping at the wheel, as it was evident they did not expect House Republicans to be able to pass any government funding bill without House Democratic votes. After briefly signaling that he would fight against the bill, Schumer rolled over, leading to a weekslong pressure campaign from his fellow Democrats, some of whom now want to push him out of his leadership position.
Schumer was put in between a rock and a hard place. The 2024 elections were a clear and decisive victory for President Donald Trump, who won all seven swing states, and for Republicans, who held the House and flipped four Senate seats to take unified control of Congress. The results were a rejection of the Democratic Party as it currently exists, and Trump hit his highest popularity ratings ever in his first weeks in office.
While most voters rejected Democrats and would likely prefer they work with Trump, Democratic voters want maximum resistance. According to NBC News, 65% of Democratic voters want Schumer and congressional Democrats to stonewall, while only 32% want compromise.
The problem is that Schumer is the one who put himself in this position. After the 2016 elections, Democratic voters preferred compromise over stonewalling 59% to 33%. Schumer, though, was caught in the throes of the Resistance fervor that plagued the Democratic Party’s activists and media allies, with Schumer constantly pushing the party’s voters to adopt his resistance at all costs.
That includes some of Schumer’s greatest hits with respect to the Supreme Court. Schumer finalized the end of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees that had been set in motion by his predecessor, Harry Reid, when he led the Democratic filibuster of Neil Gorsuch. It was a futile act of resistance that would accomplish nothing but setting the stage for Republicans to get Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett into the court in the coming years, while Schumer and his perpetual Senate majority could do nothing but watch and complain.
Schumer ramped the hysteria up to 11 with Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle, letting his caucus fall into a hysterical rape hoax based on the word of a woman who could not ever verify that the party she and Kavanaugh were supposedly at ever happened or that she and Kavanaugh had ever even met. Unable to stop Gorsuch or Kavanaugh from being confirmed, Schumer then took to threatening them in front of a crowd of abortion-crazed activists. “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” Schumer said. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Having not learned his lesson, Schumer spent the last several years trying to eliminate the legislative filibuster so Democrats could ram their agenda through the Senate. Schumer prioritized this attempted power grab to the point that Democratic voters ran Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Joe Manchin (I-WV) out of the party. Both became independents and then chose not to run for reelection, a particularly damaging move for Democrats in West Virginia, where Manchin was the only Democrat who had a prayer of winning in the state.
Schumer spent the 2024 election cycle preparing to eliminate the filibuster again, measuring the drapes for a Harris-Walz takeover of the White House. This then crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, with the Harris-Walz ticket being resoundingly rejected while Schumer lost his majority leader role as Democrats lost control of the Senate. Proving that he is incapable of seeing more than five minutes into the future, Schumer then shifted to begging Republicans not to do what he himself was planning on doing, demanding “bipartisan cooperation.”
In the aftermath of Senate Democrats folding and the murmurs that Schumer should be replaced, Schumer tried to defend his position as the Democratic Senate leader based on winning elections. His record there, though, is dubious. Schumer took over as leader after the 2016 elections, with Democrats sitting in a 52-48 minority. Democrats won the Senate seat in Alabama, though that had nothing to do with Schumer (or even Democratic candidate Doug Jones) and everything to do with the disastrous campaign of Republican Roy Moore.
In the 2018 Democratic wave year, the House Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi flipped 41 seats. Schumer’s Senate Democrats ended up losing two, driven in part by Republican voters angered by Schumer’s treatment of Kavanaugh during the latter’s confirmation battle. Schumer only managed to go from minority leader to majority leader after the 2020 elections, in which Trump sabotaged the two GOP candidates in the Georgia runoffs with his wild conspiracy theories about the presidential election being stolen from him.
Democrats flipped one more seat in 2022, giving them a 51-49 majority, the peak of Schumer’s Senate power. And yet, that was only made possible by Trump tanking the Georgia runoffs. If Trump hadn’t demotivated Republicans from voting in those two races, Schumer would be in year nine as the Democratic Senate leader and would have been in the minority for his entire tenure.
Schumer, to put it bluntly, is simply not good at politics at the level of a majority leader. His treatment of Manchin, helping run him out of the party, is juxtaposed by Republicans maintaining Sen. Susan Collins’s seat in Maine, where only she can win. Schumer isn’t good at playing the bipartisan game in the Senate, either. He said including Collins in stimulus talks was a mistake, badmouthing the most gettable Republican vote on a given issue and permanently damaging that working relationship, and mocked Republicans on the Senate floor shortly after a bipartisan deal with him on the debt ceiling.
Combine that with Senate Democrats’ poor electoral record under Schumer’s leadership, and you have a man who has failed at most of the tasks he has taken up. He dug the grave for Senate Democrats on the judicial filibuster and Supreme Court nominations, sabotaged his own chances of bipartisan cooperation, and only manages to have electoral success when Republicans decide they are tired of all the winning.
SCHUMER REJECTS CALLS TO STEP DOWN AND DISMISSES BIDEN COMPARISONS
The only thing that Schumer succeeded at is fomenting the “Resistance” mindset among his Democratic base. That has had no electoral benefit and, in fact, may now be a hindrance toward Democratic efforts to retake the federal trifecta, as Democratic voters demand defiance after everyone else shifted to the right.
Meanwhile, the very mob demanding Schumer step down after he backed down is the mob Schumer himself helped create. After nine years of poor inter- and intra-caucus politicking, terrible electoral performances, and futile stunts designed to gin up passionate anger in the Democratic base, Schumer has managed possibly to fumble away his leadership position at a time when Democrats are leaderless. None of this could happen to a worse politician.