In the weeks leading up to the pivotal vote on the GOP’s Continuing Resolution (CR), the national media and Democrats were wringing their hands over their party’s “disarray.”
“Democrats in disarray,” claimed the Norfolk Daily News. “Democrats in Disarray as Trump Pushes Through Agenda,” declared the Wall Street Journal. Bloomberg pointed out that no one knows how to bring the party out of its doldrums. “Democrats Are in Disarray With No Easy Fix,” the media outlet ruminated.
Rudderless, and aimless, the Democrats were in a world of hurt. To make the situation worse, no one was listening to anyone else. The ideas on how to combat Donald Trump’s onslaught went from the idiotic to the dangerous. The Democratic Party was well and truly stuck in neutral, with no solutions readily presenting themselves.
At this point, party leaders in Congress stepped up to offer a way forward. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries believed that total, absolute, unanimous opposition to everything Trump proposed was the path forward. When the Continuing Resolution came to a vote, just one Democrat defected to vote for it.
But beyond that vote, there was no unanimity for a strategy to oppose a determined president to implement his agenda. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decided to vote for the CR and live to fight another day. Schumer believed that the political risk of blocking Trump’s agenda far outweighed the certain negative blowback the party would get for not “fighting” hard enough to derail Trump’s agenda.
More than that, Schumer probably realized the outrage that would rain down on him personally from his Democratic colleagues in Congress. Schumer has spent a quarter of a century in the Senate, and a decade before that in the House. It was not a surprise to him that his own party would turn on him.
“He’s done a great deal of damage to the party,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of a liberal group, Indivisible. Levin is organizing a conference call with the group’s New York chapter and other local Democrats to “seriously consider if the current [Democratic] leadership is equipped to handle the moment we’re in.”
Even House Minority Leader Jeffries refused to perform the political courtesy of backing his Senate counterpart. When asked on Friday if there should be new leadership in the Senate, he simply said “next question.”
“There is a massive effort going on with people reaching out to their senators … still happening this morning,” one House Democrat told Axios on Friday.
“We just need to pick off four or five” senators, the lawmaker said.
It takes a lot more than some backbench Senators to dethrone the leader. But from a PR standpoint, it’s an unmitigated disaster.
Or is it?
“Anytime you have a failure — and this is a failure altogether — we as a caucus owe it to Democrats across the country and our constituents to look back and see: How do we get ourselves into this situation?” said Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego.
Is it Chuck Schumer’s fault that the Democrats would be politically punished if they voted against the CR?
Schumer’s biggest problem is that the party is hopelessly divided. In the House’s near-unanimous opposition to the CR, the Democratic caucus wanted to go in half a dozen different directions. There was no consensus on how to proceed beyond voting “no.”
The frustration toward Schumer reflects a boiling anger among Democrats over what they view as their party’s lack of a strategy for taking on Trump in his second term. Though few in Democratic circles think Schumer’s job as minority leader is at risk — and he isn’t up for reelection until 2028 — the frustration toward him spans the party’s spectrum, from moderates to progressives, both in and outside of Congress.
Schumer has defended his vote to keep the government running as the best of two bad choices aimed at not ceding Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk even more power to slash the government. Nine Democratic senators and an independent who caucuses with Democrats joined him to advance the bill, enough to prevent a government shutdown.
There’s no grand strategy because a number of members will reject anything Schumer proposes. The crisis afflicting the Democrats is existential, and has little to do with strategy on opposing Trump. They have no strategy because they have no agenda.
Schumer isn’t stupid. It may be that he’s using up his prestige, carefully husbanded over his 30 years in Washington, to act as a punching bag to unite the Democrats in any way possible. He certainly did that. However, moving on from there to developing a winning strategy is going to be a lot harder.
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