AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott
After almost 50 years in public service, Chuck Schumer finally got there. Last year, the consummate career politician became Senate majority leader, the job he had been lusting after for decades. Leading the Senate is the apex of any Senator’s political career, a chance to wield real power. Yet after just over 12 months in this coveted role, Schumer presides over a caucus that is fractured, deeply unpopular with voters, blamed by Democrats for blowing up the Biden agenda, and looking at a likely return to minority status less than one year from now. Poor Chuck Schumer. How did it all go so wrong, so fast?
To begin to unravel this story, we need to recall that Democrats only squeaked into power by the narrowest of margins. For months prior to the 2020 election, pollsters and pundits promised a “blue wave” of Democratic wins across the country. But when the dust cleared after Election Day and Joe Biden was declared the winner of the White House, Democrats had unexpectedly lost seats in the House, gained only a single seat in the Senate, and the two Georgia Senate races were headed to a runoff. Arguably no group was more surprised when Democrats won both Georgia Senate Races than Democrats themselves, but even those pickups only got Democrats to a 50-50 split, with only the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris allowing Democrats to claim a Senate majority. Schumer became majority leader, but with the unenviable task of needing to keep his party completely unified to pass any legislation.
Almost immediately, a schism that had been growing for some time within the Democratic Party became even more pronounced. On one side, young progressive upstarts like Reps. Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded that Democrats use this moment to advance aggressive spending packages in an attempt to “remake” America – no matter that Democrats hardly had a mandate from voters to carry out such sweeping changes. Their rationale was that by enacting this radical agenda, they would inspire and motivate Americans to help them defeat Republicans in 2022.
The other, far smaller, group of Democrats appeared to recognize the danger of pursuing such a radical policy platform. Primarily led by West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, this group of self-described “moderates” were still more liberal than Democrats of even a decade ago, but nonetheless recognized the political danger of their colleagues’ extremism. While their numbers were small, a 50-50 Senate means each senator is a king of sorts, with the power to derail any proceedings.
In addition to his difficult challenges in the Senate, Schumer was dealing with an even more radical-left Democrat caucus in the House. Even as he himself was clearly among the more liberal members of the upper chamber, Schumer has always had much better political instincts than his House counterpart, Nancy Pelosi. But those instincts could not insulate him from feeling the heat of left-wing critics like Ocasio-Cortez, who, in thinly veiled comments, recently blasted the Senate as an “old boys” club.” Meanwhile, in the White House, Schumer is dealing with a historically unpopular president whose staff has pursued the most radical agenda of any administration in history.
It is this cauldron of political intemperance that has defined what is most likely to be Poor Chuck Schumer’s brief and a tragicomic stint as majority leader.
In the beginning, Democrats remained hopeful about Schumer’s prospects of maneuvering their agenda through a 50-50 Senate, as the New York senator had a history of building deep relationships with his colleagues. Despising email, the Majority Leader allegedly has the phone number of almost every senator memorized.
Success in his role would likely have required leveraging these people skills to steer his party toward a more moderate approach. Yet, whether out of sincere leftist conviction, fear of a primary challenge, or simply catastrophic misjudgment, Schumer apparently decided to enable Biden and Pelosi’s “go for broke” mentality in more ways than one.
Despite his campaign promise to be a consensus builder, Biden abruptly decided that he wanted to be a “transformational” leader after taking office, and Schumer went right along. When Biden proposed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, Republicans offered to come to the table and, together, craft a more reasonable bipartisan plan. Yet Schumer aggressively lobbied the White House to ice out the Republicans completely and rammed the bill through with no GOP input. The gamble paid off (in the short term, at least). The bill passed, but the whole experience left Republicans – and even some moderate Democrats – resentful over the blitz.
Buoyed by this success, Biden then pushed for more than $5 trillion in new spending via the American Infrastructure Act and the much larger Build Back Better Act. Both bills were a mishmash of climate funding, tax hikes, aggressive spending packages, and a few legitimate infrastructure projects. When Sen. Manchin began to bristle at the price tags, Schumer quickly shuffled the bills around to place all the “hard” infrastructure projects in the $1.9 trillion “bipartisan” infrastructure bill and the other $3.5 trillion into the Build Back Better Act. But the schism within the party was only beginning to widen.
The Progressive Caucus in the House demanded that both bills come to the floor simultaneously. After all, if one bill is explicitly progressive and the other is bipartisan, why wouldn’t the moderate legislators pass one and kill the other? The disagreements stalled Biden’s agenda for months until the surprise Republican election victories in New Jersey, and Virginia sent Democrats into a frenzy to pass something. Progressives didn’t get their way, the bills were separated, and the entire House Progressive Caucus voted against the infrastructure bill. While the gamble paid off again, it cost the Democrats any illusion of unity.
By the time Schumer began pushing his caucus to back the BBB Act, it was clear that Sens. Manchin and Sinema were tired of the Majority Leader’s unilateralism. It was then revealed that, in a secret agreement from July of last year, Manchin and Schumer had agreed to cap new spending in BBB at $1.5 trillion. Schumer had broken his promise by more than twice that amount. Schumer tried to work some of his old New York-pol magic on Manchin by haggling over what the actual cost of the bill would be (with the White House even pitching in and incredulously insisting that the cost was actually $0), but an incensed Manchin was officially done. To his party’s chagrin, he went on the dreaded Fox News network to announce that BBB was dead. Progressives considered themselves betrayed by their own party.
Pelosi and Schumer scrambled to try in vain to pump life back into HR-1, the so-called “For the People Act.” If Schumer couldn’t have a slush fund for progressive priorities, he could at least have his federal takeover of elections and abolishment of Voter ID, or so Democrats hoped. Schumer needed a pivot, and a deceptively-branded “voting rights” push seemed to fit the bill. Yet the only way the bill would pass would be to eliminate part, if not all, of the filibuster – another thing that Sen. Manchin, as well as fellow moderate Kyrsten Sinema, had promised not to do.
Despite knowing this, and repudiating his own past impassioned defense of the filibuster, Schumer advanced both a revamped version of HR-1 and filibuster “reform” to the Senate floor. Both votes failed, as expected. Schumer would later say in an interview: “Senators are here to vote. They should be put on record…Those who are opposed to advancing voting rights and who support suppression of voting rights — the public should know who they are.”
Perhaps Schumer thought that, under direct pressure, Manchin and Sinema would cave. Or maybe, as he stated, he felt that having the GOP, Manchin, and Sinema vote against these bills would leave Republicans vulnerable in the coming midterms. But what increasingly appears to actually have happened is that Democrats have emerged from the debacle looking even more radical, disunited, and incompetent.
Schumer has since moved on to other bills, but the damage has been done. By alienating Sinema and Manchin, he has nearly turned a 50-seat majority party into a 48-seat minority on the key issues. Progressives are as angry with Sens. Manchin and Sinema as they are with Schumer. Despite Schumer completely submitting to progressives at every turn, progressives, for some reason nonetheless, blame Poor Chuck. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is even reportedly mulling a primary challenge.
With the midterms approaching, it appears increasingly unlikely that Congress will have the political will to pass much, if any, substantive legislation before November when Republicans are likely to take back control of both chambers. With that window passed, and with progressives demanding that Democratic leadership get younger, more diverse, and even more extreme, the sun may already be setting on Schumer’s brief and ill-fated tenure as majority leader. But while Schumer may lament his misfortune and blame the few moderate Democrats left for not capitulating to his every demand, he has only himself to blame for not resisting Pelosi and Biden, and allowing his party to be led so far astray.
Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with over a decade of experience in DC at the intersection of politics and culture.