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Over the past several days, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has sought to quell fury within his party over his leadership, stemming largely — but not completely — from his recent support for a Republican-devised spending bill that will impose deep spending cuts to critical federal programs.
Schumer’s appearance Tuesday on “All In with Chris Hayes” proved his critics are right to voice concerns about whether he's up to the challenge of facing off against President Donald Trump's illiberal administration and its allies in Congress.
After Hayes showed a supercut of Democrats criticizing Schumer's vote in favor of the bill, the senator insisted that a government shutdown — which would have happened had the spending bill not passed by last Friday's deadline — would give the executive branch maximum power to control and cut federal programs.
“If you don’t have a shutdown, you can go to court,” Schumer said at one point, nodding to one of the few tools Democrats have used to take on the Trump administration’s aggressive cuts. Schumer told Hayes a shutdown would mean giving Republicans “the keys to the city.” Hayes, however, argued a shutdown could have been used as leverage and an opportunity to make Americans understand the seriousness of the Trump administration’s lawlessness.
It was fair for Schumer to argue, as he did, that he made a tough decision. The problem is that his job isn’t merely to make tough decisions, even if those decisions are the correct ones (and I’m not certain this one was). As the leader of Senate Democrats, his job is arguably to devise and unify his party — and fundamentally, voters who empowered them — around a substantive plan to push back against Trump, amid widespread concerns about Trump’s imposition of what Hayes has rightly called an “American dictatorship.”
And Schumer fell short on that front. In the most revealing exchange of the night, he told Hayes he didn’t think the United States is currently in a constitutional crisis, but that we’re “getting there” and that Trump defying a Supreme Court ruling would truly amount to such a crisis.
Polling has shown Democratic Party voters overwhelmingly want leaders in their party to fight harder against Trump’s administration, but Schumer’s claim suggested he doesn’t share their urgency.
It’s a point Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive activist group Indivisible, made during an interview on "All In" immediately following Schumer's appearance.
"Now that I understand Schumer doesn’t believe we’re yet in a constitutional crisis, his tactical shortcomings make sense," Levin told Hayes. "But his position here is also deeply out of line with rank and file Dems. We need new leadership."
On social media, various liberal activists and commentators let out what was essentially a collective groan over the Schumer interview. The Senate Democratic leader’s support from his party’s base was already unstable. Tuesday’s interview was revelatory — and did little to alleviate concerns from some of his party members.