Schumer's Not the Problem
Democratic Party at record lows with its own voters because the party's leaders aren't
Mar. 17: Progressive orgs call for new Senate Democratic leadership … Two polls show Democratic Party favorability at record low … Trump signed funding bill even though bill defenders claimed a shutdown would have been a gift … Meet the DOGE fashion influencer …
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I know, I know. It was just Friday when TFN’s headline was literally “Chuck Schumer,” because chuck is a verb! And now, in the very next TFN, the headline claims that Schumer’s not the problem? What the fucking news?
Is TFN flip-flopping like some sort of Democratic Senate minority leader? Of course not!
Arguing that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) isn’t the problem doesn’t mean he shouldn’t go. It’s a warning that replacing Schumer isn’t necessarily a cure-all. In fact, there’s no reason to think his replacement wouldn’t be worse.
Still, the knives are out.
Yesterday, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) said of Schumer helping the GOP pass its some-funding bill, “He is absolutely wrong.” Crockett twisted the knife, fucking up my knives-being-out metaphor: “The idea that Chuck Schumer is the only one that’s got a brain in the room and the only one that can think through all of the pros and cons is absolutely ridiculous.” She asked Senate Democrats to consider choosing a new leader.
The progressive activists of Indivisible on Saturday called on Schumer to step down as the chamber’s Democratic leader. A stunning 91% of Indivisible leaders voted to urge Schumer’s departure. That included 82% in Schumer’s home state. (The “Pass the Torch” coalition that pressured Pres. Joe Biden to drop out is also now aiming its torches at Schumer.)
On Friday, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) declined to get Schumer’s back, possibly due to the stab wounds in his own.
And on Thursday, some House Democrats reportedly went so far as to urge Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to primary Schumer. In other words, not just take away his leadership position, but his Senate seat. (He’s not up for re-election until 2028.)
And all of this cascading leadershipwreck came after CNN polling done March 6-9 — but only released yesterday — found that only 29% of the American public see the Democratic Party favorably. That’s the lowest that number’s been since CNN started polling this in 1992.
The reason for the drop is that fewer Democrats and aligned Independents support the party. And a majority, 57%, say the party shouldn’t work with Republicans. They say Democrats should fight Republicans. Y’know, like they’ve been supposed to since the founding fathers created an adversarial system that incentivizes rivals to compete for power.
In yet another case of progressives being rightest earliest, Democrats who lived through the vile, antipatriotic, unprincipled oppositional tactics of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Tea Party, Donald Trump, and MAGA writ large have slowly but surely abandoned the feel-good fairy-tale of working with nihilists who hate the United States government. I can assert this as fact because chart:
A new NBC News poll comes to virtually the same conclusions.
Nevertheless, some Democrats still cling to their fear of fighting, also known as democraphobia. Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) and Haley Stevens (D-MI) told the New York Times that infighting would only draw attention to the party’s rift … a concern that never seems to apply when Senate Democratic leaders want to break with the majority of their party.
Auchincloss and Stevens told the Times that internal Democratic debates would distract voters’ attention from the economic damage Trump’s policies are doing. Because, yes, in many realities, voters often become so engrossed in reading Politico/Puck/Punchbowl/Axios that they don’t notice their money disappearing. #ThingsThatHappen
The Republican Party has been nothing but an ongoing internal battle/surrender for almost a decade now. And yet they seem to be managing okay (numerically, not morally) with only the White House, Senate, House of Representatives, Supreme Court, and most statehouses to show for their efforts.
Yes, Democrats need more fighting, but getting rid of Schumer doesn’t mean things will change. The problem isn’t the man, it’s the office. Look at how last week happened.
Why did a minority of Senate Democrats thwart the will of a majority of Senate Democrats — and the all-but-one1 entirety of House Democrats — and enable Republicans to send Trump the funding bill he signed on Saturday?
My theory — which has evidence but not proof — is that Schumer saw that the GOP funding bill had support from enough Democrats to beat a filibuster and pass. A leader’s job at that point — in some people’s framing — is to protect those members, in this case shielding Democratic pacifists from political consequences.
The prevailing narrative is that Schumer genuinely — for some reason — did a 180 in 24 hours on this issue based on reasoning that was just as true before he flipped.
Josh Barro, a smart guy whom I used to put on TV when I worked at MSNBC, wrote that a shutdown “would not advance Democrats’ policy agenda and would only hand Donald Trump more power in his already-ongoing project to dismantle large parts of the federal government.”2
Which is true! Robert’s Rules of Downshutting say the president is allowed to determine what’s “essential” and what must stop functioning.
Barro tells Schumer’s critics:
“I want you to explain to me what sequence of events would follow from blockage and lead to a government that operates more in line with Democrats’ values and preferences — that is, how this whole exercise would make the public any better off.”
And in Barro’s defense, no one has really laid out a plausible scenario to justify the criticism of Schumer. Yet! #Foreshadowing
Barro argues that a shutdown would have been something close to a dream scenario for the Republicans:
...neither the Trump Administration nor Republicans in Congress would care if a shutdown made it difficult for government agencies to function. What they would care about is that a government shutdown, if Democrats forced one, would unlock more legal power for the president to decide how the government should operate. Trump could declare functions he does care about to be “essential” and keep them going, while furloughing all the employees he’d really like to fire and shutting down all the operations he’d like to permanently terminate, and he could do so with much stronger legal authority than DOGE has been using to do similar things to date.
Big if true! But I don’t think Schumer’s defenders have addressed the full implications of their own argument. If a shutdown would have unlocked more legal power for Trump to decide government operations and furlough/shut down everything he wants, well, then… why did Trump sign the bill preventing all of that?
Not a rhetorical question! In fact, I have a possible answer, which in my view also refutes the argument that Schumer and Democrats were right to support the funding bill.
The answer — or my answer — is politics. In the event of a shutdown, as Barro notes, Trump would have been solely responsible for every decision about what to shut down.
But Trump is agnostic about government. He just wants to be in charge. He doesn’t care a lot about what the government does. He just knows it’s wrong when he’s not the one deciding.
Hence Elon Musk. Musk is his hatchet man. Trump walks back the hatcheting when it becomes politically toxic.
A shutdown would have left Trump with no Musk to blame. A shutdown was the last thing Trump wanted because then he’d be blamed by veterans and poor people for their starving/dying/medical bankruptcies.
Or, if he carved out big shutdown exemptions, Trump would be blamed by his far-right base for not fucking people over. He’d be exposed as not giving a crap about Grover Norquist’s infanticide fantasies3.
Trump consistently tries to have it both ways. Abortion. Entitlements. Isolationism.
A shutdown would have put all the decisions right in his lap, which we’ve seen him time and again try to avoid. He still hasn’t adjudicated the Senate/House rift over how to pass his alleged agenda.
An awesome Newsfucker shared the Barro take with me (thank you!) and another one shared another Schumer defense from Matt Yglesias (also thank you!)
Yglesias’s argument is similar to Barro’s: Schumer would have handed Trump and Musk immense powers to eviscerate the federal government. But, again, if Trump would’ve gotten such immense powers from a shutdown, why did he sign a bill preventing that?
Like Barro, Yglesias says that:
...neither House Democrats nor the people voting “no” in the Senate nor the people getting mad on Twitter have an actual strategy for getting what the base wants out of this.
And that’s a fair, if condescending, critique, I believe. I also haven’t seen anyone articulate the “what if there were a shutdown” argument. So allow me.
What the Democratic base wants is big government. Robust government. Free health care. Free education. Obviously, neither option (shutdown or funding bill) would get us there, but there is a viable argument that a shutdown would have put us on a better path.
In the event of a legislative shutdown, Trump would have to decide what goes away and what stays. And his fingerprints would be on all of it.
The American people put Republicans in charge of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the executive branch. And, indirectly, the judicial branch. It’s only a matter of time, then, until we see what that truly looks like.
It seems to me we’re better off hitting bottom sooner rather than later. The more time people have to appreciate what Trump’s base wants him to do, the more time there is to mobilize and organize for 2026 and 2028.
Trump is educating the American people about just how much our government does. The sooner people learn it, the better. Let “I didn’t vote for this” ring across the land.
Because this isn’t just about the elections. We’re already seeing outrage flooding Republican town halls. As voters learn about just how much the government does, they’re going to start pressuring their representatives, Republican and Democratic, well before the next elections. That’s a good thing. That’s one element no one’s included in their “what now” hypotheses about what happens now.
Another was the egregious effect Schumer’s capitulation would have on both his party and the multi-valent opposition movement — the unions, the nonprofits, the lawyers, the organizers, the organized, and more lawyers.
I tend to suspect Schumer agrees with all of this. But his job as Senate Democratic leader isn’t — in some people’s view — to lead a movement. It’s not to lead the party. It isn’t even to tell his caucus what to do. It’s to protect them — whatever they do.
That’s why the problem isn’t the man, it’s the office. Because the Senate sees the job that way, too. That’s why you heard none of the other Democrats criticize Schumer.
And The Bulwark zoomed in on who’s in line to replace Schumer. Next up is Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). The Bulwark focuses on his age, which I don’t give a shit about. What TFN does give a shit about is that Durbin was one of the Democrats who voted for the GOP funding bill.
I have a theory I want to flesh out in a future post about who Schumer (and possibly Durbin) may have been protecting by voting for the funding bill, but the bottom line is that bouncing Schumer won’t change things if the job still involves shielding Democrats from the consequences of their politics. That’s an undemocratic function.
The Senate is — or was — known as the world’s greatest deliberative body. But Democratic deliberating at this watershed moment was conducted out of sight, behind the watershed. With the exception of Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), we knew before the vote where virtually none of the Democrats stood4.
I disagree with Fetterman’s approach to this issue and his contemptuous style, but I’m glad to see at least one Senate Democrat being relatively forthright about where they stand. If Schumer should go, it’s less because of where he stood (or fell) on the funding bill, it’s because giving his caucus opacity deprives Democratic voters of transparency. And democracy.
One Quickie
I was overly optimistic about my ability to get you Newsfuckers a timely and normal TFN today — the redeye from California last night took a lot out of me! I should be back to normal-ish tomorrow, but did have one quickie lying around to share…
The Dept. of Government Efficiency (DOGE) must be thrilled with CNN right about now. CNN found a federal worker not doing her job and wasting precious taxpayer dollars. Meet McLaurine Pinover, chief spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), whose job is primarily pretending that DOGE isn’t really firing anyone and defending DOGE’s job cuts. Turns out, Pinover was appointed to the post by the Trump administration in January and now uses the office and her time and the salary you paid for to … post shit online as an alleged fashion influencer. Pinover’s recent work activities include deleting her @getdressedwithmc Instagram account almost instantly after CNN asked her about it, costing her approximately 800 followers who sought fashion-forward advice from a backward-looking political appointee. Here she is in all her taxpayer-funded glory:
Cutting edge, there, Ofdonald.
TCB
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ELECTIONS I’ve still gotta dig up others, but this one’s a big one:
April 1: Wisconsin state Supreme Court — Democrat Susan Crawford vs. Republican Brad Schimel.
TAKING ACTION Upcoming events/actions:
Today-The Second Coming: Tesla boycott.
March 21-28: Nestlé Blackout (water wars, child labor)
March 28: Economic Blackout #2
April 7-13: Walmart Blackout (‘nuff said)
April 18: Economic Blackout #3
April 21-27: General Mills Blackout
RESOURCES
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TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME).
Norquist is the guy who dreamt of making government small enough to drown in a bathtub, utilizing a totally non-sociopathic metaphor that we all turn to in our daily lives like normal people.
Fetterman’s argument that a shutdown is impermissible strikes me as politically naive because he’s telling Republicans he’ll vote for anything that stops a shutdown. Republicans can legislate a budget that’s $1 short of a full shutdown, and Fetterman will give them a yea.
I think the idea that the American people would pin the cuts on Trump to be wishful thinking. For starters, there's nothing stopping Trump from declaring DOGE to be essential and have Elon continue to do his dirty work. It's not like Musk cares about any direct paycheck from this work, so why would a government shutdown stop him?
I guess I don't see how the shutdown would have a) sped things up or b) made it all Trump's doing. In fact, isn't it the reverse? Wouldn't a shutdown allow the Republicans to say the Democrats made us do this? I know that's very twisted, but it would certainly sell among their crowd, and probably also on what passes for mainstream TV news these days. I also think that our great problem as libs is that all our fights are stoppers, rather than positives. Medicare for All is the great elephant in the room, and it remains anathema to TPTB in the DP. There's the rub.