Sometime late last week, just as #SchumerShutdown was beginning to trend and it was clear that the House GOP was united behind a spending bill, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York came to a stomach-churning conclusion: His options were 1) bad and 2) worse.
On one hand, he could accept the bitter pill and deal with the rancor within his own party. On the other, he could throw his past rhetoric — where he avouched, when Republicans were in the minority in the Senate, that shutting the government down usually is neither cost-effective nor responsible — out the window and shut down the government, which would likely end worse for the Democrats.
He chose the former path. The left wing of the Democratic Party is now eating its own and wants Chuck Schumer to resign — even after Schumer made an outreach effort to them over the weekend, which apparently didn’t work.
According to a Monday report in Politico, Schumer and his team “have been talking privately with liberal groups in an apparent effort to ease tensions after sparking a civil war in the Democratic Party over a stopgap funding bill” in the wake of Friday’s action.
The verdict, after talking for five people on the inside of the powwows? “It isn’t going great,” Politico’s Holly Otterbein said.
In case you missed it, Schumer announced Thursday that he was voting for the House GOP continuing resolution after it became clear that the Democrats didn’t have many options, calling it a “Hobson’s choice” in a speech from the Senate floor and saying that a shutdown would allow President Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency carte blanche to dismantle parts of the government they didn’t like.
“Either proceed with the bill before us or risk Donald Trump throwing America into the chaos of a shutdown. This in my view is no choice at all. While the [House bill] is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse,” Schumer said.
Schumer’s language may have been dramatic, but he wasn’t wrong. To be clear, there wasn’t a choice; the hope was that the House GOP’s slim majority would be enough to sink any continuing resolution, particularly since libertarian-leaning GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky reliably votes against any spending bill that keeps funding for the federal government above Coolidge administration levels. (That’s in real, not adjusted, dollars.) But they did, alas, dashing that hope that the cup would pass from the Senate Democrats.
The Senate Dems also held out hope that a short-term bill could keep the government open while they negotiated with Republicans, which gave them an alternative to either blocking a vote via filibuster or shutting down the government.
Should Chuck Schumer resign as Senate minority leader?
Republicans made it clear this wasn’t an option, thanks to Schumer’s decision to stop long-term funding in order to use it as a bargaining chip for a bargain he couldn’t strike: “The only reason we’re voting on a CR is because Senator Schumer refused to put the normal appropriations bills on the floor for a vote last year. Now they want another short term bill? Nope,” GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas wrote on X.
The only reason we’re voting on a CR is because Senator Schumer refused to put the normal appropriations bills on the floor for a vote last year. Now they want another short term bill? Nope. https://t.co/MgVrQQXQdj
— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) March 12, 2025
Thus came a whirlwind of opprobrium from the left. The nicer people — i.e., the ones not calling for Chuck Schumer’s head — were the elected Democrats. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, called it a “false choice that some are buying instead of fighting,” adding that it was “unacceptable.”
Appearing on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan — co-chair of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee — blamed Schumer for the Republicans voting as a bloc in the House, saying he “sent out mixed signals” and that “there was already just a license for DOGE to go ahead and do whatever it wants.”
“People are angry,” she told host Margaret Brennan, according to a transcript, adding that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York “showed you that he could [maintain unity] last week.”
“They want to see Democrats fighting back, and they’re really scared about what’s going to happen to them, particularly on seniors,” she said, another slam on Schumer.
And if you think the elected Democrats were bad, take the activist left — which has seized at least part of the Democrat machinery in the wake of the party’s 2024 failures and is attempting to guide the directionless party around by the force of its performative outrage.
Take Indivisible, arguably the most responsible and levelheaded of these groups. Ezra Levin, the co-founder of the group and essentially its public face, said that Schumer has “done a great deal of damage to the party” and that he’d scheduled an emergency call on Saturday to “seriously consider if the current [Democratic] leadership is equipped to handle the moment we’re in.”
Politico reported that Schumer spoke with Levin and that his “team tried to persuade the New York leaders at Indivisible not to immediately sign onto a statewide letter that called for Schumer to quit his position as minority leader, said one of the people familiar with the discussions. Schumer spoke to the New York Indivisible officials on Sunday. They called for him to step down as minority leader anyway on Monday.”
Whoops. One of the people who was in on the discussions between Schumer and Indivisible described them as “tense and unproductive.”
Then there’s Charlotte Clymer, the transgender activist who holds an inordinate amount of sway over the party’s direction despite (or perhaps because of) no capacity to read reality or accept compromise. He’s assembled over 25,000 signatures and said Schumer is postponing book tour events because he “doesn’t want to face the music over his caving to Trump and Elon Musk.” Which is to say, Clymer is annoyed he and his coterie can’t harass Schumer at book tour events.
And then there’s MoveOn, the granddaddy of the hashtag activism movement which has apparently dropped the .org from its name at some point in what one assumes is a (futile) bid at legitimacy. MoveOn spokeswoman Britt Jacovich said they’d been in touch with Schumer’s people in order to relay “our members’ concerns about the lack of strategy and message around the Republican funding bill vote and the desire from our members for Democrats to use every bit of their power to fight back against Trump and [Elon Musk’s] destruction of our government.”
Now, generally speaking, the activist wing of either political wing in the United States isn’t a particularly effective judge of political realities and leadership shouldn’t ordinarily concern themselves with them. The exception is when the party that represents that wing has itself forsaken bedrock realities for too long and finds itself coping without the aid of direction or an effective bargaining strategy.
Chuck Schumer’s great crime isn’t caving to Trump and Musk, as those within his party and his party’s activist gadfly organizations now claim, but putting itself in a position of denying those realities for so long that there simply aren’t any bargaining chips left on the table. It’s a rare day when I find myself advocating for Schumer, but at least give him this: He’s willing to acknowledge reality. For this unfortunate moment of clarity, he could find himself out of a job.
I can’t think of a better guy it could happen to, although I still can’t help but have sympathy for a man finally owning up to the truth –somewhere between two to three years too late, mind you — and finding it could cost him the power he’s spent a lifetime trying to earn.
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