The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Chuck Schumer Tells the Truth?

Posted on | March 24, 2025 | 47 Comments

Ed Morrissey is having a gloat about Chuck Schumer’s appearance Sunday on Meet the Press, where Kristen Welker challenged him: “Leader Schumer, are you feeling pressure to step down?” To which Schumer replied. “Look, I’m not stepping down.” And this is gloat-worthy, because Schumer has become toxic with the Democratic Party’s “progressive” grassroots since he punted on his previous threat of a government shutdown. However — wow, how did this ever happen? — I feel a need to say a few words in defense of Schumer.

In explaining his vote in favor of the continuing resolution (CR) that will keep the government funded for another six months, Schumer said, “The CR was certainly bad, you know, the continuing resolution. But a shutdown would be 15 or 20 times worse,” before going on to explain that such a shutdown would have empowered Trump to pick and choose which agencies and programs got closed until Congress could reach a spending agreement. And this is certainly true, even if Schumer’s suggestions about what Trump might have done are paranoid fantasies invented to stoke the fears of liberals. Far more important to Schumer, however, is that Democrats would have been blamed for the shutdown.

Republicans already had their “Schumer Shutdown” talking points ready to roll if Schumer had filibustered the CR. That’s one thing that the lunatic fringe of the Democratic Party doesn’t wish to acknowledge — there was a Senate majority in favor of passing the CR, and in order to prevent that, Schumer would have had to order Democrats to vote “no” on cloture, thus filibustering the bill. Democrats are on record denouncing the filibuster as an outdated vestige of Jim Crow, just like Democrats are on record declaring that government shutdowns are horrible, and yet the Left was demanding that Schumer invoke a filibuster to cause a shutdown? The optics of such a maneuver would be awful, and Schumer could see that train coming down the tracks at full steam. All those video clips of what Democrats said about filibusters and shutdowns in the past would have been playing on endless loop, and if you think the favorability of the Democratic Party is bad now, it would have been far worse with a “Schumer shutdown.” This is just a fact.

As Ed Morrissey says, Schumer had calculated on House Republicans coming up short of a majority on the CR, and needing Democrat voters to pass it, which would have led to negotiations favorable to Democrats. Unfortunately for Chuck, Trump helped House Speaker Mike Johnson twist enough Republican arms to get the votes he needed, which put the ball in Schumer’s court, and there was then no good option for Senate Democrats — either pass the CR, or take the blame.

Look, I know there are people on our side who hate the CR as much as any left-wing Democrat hates it — for completely opposite reasons — but when Republicans have control of the White House and both houses of Congress, it would look very bad if we couldn’t avoid a shutdown. “Amateur hour,” is what that would look like to a lot of voters, and the GOP needs to avoid lending credibility to the Democrats’ accusation that Trump is causing “chaos” in Washington. No shutdown, no chaos.

That’s the smart play, and if some MAGA true believers want to call me a sellout for advocating the smart play, well, I can’t help it. The way Washington operates, we seldom get a chance to throw a 50-yard TD pass, and instead must content ourselves to push the ball down the field one play at a time. Don’t turn the ball over, don’t commit any stupid penalties, and execute the fundamentals — that’s winning football.

If we want to convince voters that the Democratic Party is a dangerous collection of fringe kooks — which, of course, they are — then it behooves us to avoid acting like fringe kooks ourselves. And you can already see how this pays off: Chuck Schumer actually did the right thing for once in his life, and it’s driving the AOC wing of the Democratic Party berserk.



 

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Category: Budget, Chuck Schumer

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