Chuck Schumer was always going to come out of the budget showdown a loser. The only question was which of the two available forms of losing he would end up with: an organized legislative surrender to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, which was the outcome he was trying to lead the Democrats toward, or a personal public rejection by his own party.
In the end, the Senate minority leader got both. He scraped up eight more Senate Democrats to join him and John Fetterman in breaking his own party's filibuster, allowing the continuing resolution written by the House Republicans to advance and sparing Donald Trump from presiding over a government shutdown. He pulled the deal together—allowing Democrats to offer amendments that would fail to pass, to show they'd tried—over the enraged objections of the united House minority, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ("To see Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing to Elon Musk, I think is a huge slap in the face") to Nancy Pelosi ("This false choice that some are buying instead of fighting is unacceptable").
"As bad as passing the continuing resolution would be," Schumer wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times before the vote, "I believe a government shutdown is far worse." Among those who didn't share Schumer's assessment was the American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing the people who would lose their paychecks in a shutdown, which had urged the Senate to vote no on advancing the resolution. But Schumer wasn't listening to them, or to anyone else.
He wasn't even listening to himself. In his Times op-ed—published immediately after his Thursday announcement that he intended to end the filibuster, making it clear that his decision had been settled all along—he tried to explain why he couldn't support a shutdown:
[A] shutdown could cause regional Veterans Affairs offices to reduce even more of their staffs, further delay benefits processing and curtail mental health services—abandoning veterans who earned, and depend on, those resources.
A shutdown could continue to slash the administrative staffs at Social Security offices—delaying applications and benefit adjustments and forcing seniors to wait even longer for their benefits.
But his argument had its own rebuttal written into it: "reduce even more," "further delay," "continue to slash," "wait even longer." These things were already reduced, delayed, slashed, and forcing people to wait. Trump and Musk were already shutting down the government, in pieces, as fast as they could.
The news that Schumer planned to cave in on the continuing resolution arrived in my feed Thursday night just after the news that Johns Hopkins University was planning to eliminate 2,000 jobs. Those jobs have to go because the Trump administration unilaterally and illegally decided to cut off $800 million in funding that Congress had appropriated to the university.
"[I]f we enter a shutdown," Schumer wrote in the Times, "congressional Republicans could weaponize their majorities to cherry-pick which parts of government to reopen." Yet after his deal was done, the news of cherries being picked kept coming: The Mauna Loa Observatory, the benchmark site for measuring atmospheric CO2, is on a list to have its lease terminated. The independent agency that runs the Voice of America is supposed to be terminated by executive order. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, which sends grant money to state libraries, is to have its functions "eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." Research into pediatric brain cancer treatment is shutting down due to lack of funds.
This wasn't even a survey, let alone a complete one, just a few more or less random items from the barrage. People keep dying preventable deaths—specific, identifiable people, and vast numbers of other human beings behind them—because of Musk's initial assault on USAID. A judge had ruled earlier last week that the cutoff of already appropriated aid had been unconstitutional, but the dead were still dead.
From the very beginning of the Trump era, Democratic leadership operated on a pair of interlocking beliefs: that Trump, left to his own devices, would naturally bring about his own downfall, and that in the meantime, choosing to do nothing about Trump was more publicly respectable—more mature, more sensible—than trying to fight back, and possibly failing.
Experiencing two months of this administration has belatedly shaken many of them out of the fantasy and into active desperation. But their Senate leader still clings to it. When he talked to the press before he let the continuing resolution through, Bloomberg reported, Schumer "acknowledged Republicans could try and jam Democrats with another partisan bill in September, but expressed hope that Trump will be less popular by then and more Republicans will resist him."
He elaborated on that same theory in a long interview published Sunday in the New York Times:
The last time he was president, which is the closest experience we have with him—and admittedly, the world has changed some, particularly on the media side, how it works—we kept pushing and pushing and pushing and chipping away. And when he went below 40 percent in the polls, the Republican legislators started working with us. He was at 51. He’s now at 48. We’re gonna keep at it until he goes below 40 .... The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won’t until we bring him down in popularity. That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us.
Among the many problems with that story of the power of patiently chipping away at Trump's standing is that Trump rallied to become president again. A huge part of Trump's popularity is simply the result of his ongoing refusal to give up and fade out. In 2015, it was shocking and ridiculous to think that a notorious crook and clown like Trump could run for president, let alone become president. Institutional Democrats eagerly embraced the possibility of his winning the Republican nomination, because he would be so easy to beat in the general. Not only did that plan fail, it managed to extinguish its own premise along the way. A college-aged person today has grown up in a world where Trump is simply what a major-party presidential candidate looks like—for three straight elections now.
Part of Schumer's lack of urgency, his Times interview made clear, is that he doesn't really believe Trump is all that bad. After a long condemnation of the protests against Israel's slaughter in Gaza—"And so when these protesters come and accuse Israel of genocide, I said, 'What about Hamas?'"—when asked about Trump's decision to illegally strip $400 million from Columbia University, he complained that Columbia had "shrugged their shoulders, looked the other way" at the protesters' excesses. He said was "trying to find out" what the money had been taken away from, and worried that the cuts might hurt students "who have nothing to do with the protest." On the case of Mahmoud Khalil, abducted from Columbia housing by ICE agents and transported to detention far out of state despite being a permanent legal resident, the senior senator from New York State said, "I don’t know all the details yet," and added: "If he broke the law, he should be deported. If he didn’t break the law and just peacefully protested, he should not be deported."
Behind his failures of tactical judgment, that is, Schumer was missing the basic reflexes of liberty. The tyranny hadn't landed anywhere that truly bothered him yet. Certainly nowhere that would justify taking a risk.
And even as he overestimated Trump's weakness, Schumer was also overestimating Trump's strength. He had convinced himself that if the filibuster held, the Senate Republicans would refuse to compromise, and the Democrats—the party that does not control the White House or either house of Congress—would be blamed for the shutdown. A government shutdown under Donald Trump would be a political victory for Trump, as well as a license for him to do even more damage to the government.
"Trump wanted a shutdown," Schumer told the Times. "Musk wanted a shutdown. Ask yourself why."
Did Trump want a shutdown? He didn't act as if he did. That was why the Senate had a chance to vote on a continuing resolution at all—because Trump had muscled the rebellious far-right fringe in the House into passing one. The last time the budget deadline came up, the House Republicans had been ready to bring down their own Speaker rather than sign off on an agreement, and they needed Democrats to bail them out. But last time around, Joe Biden was still president.
The filibuster, applied to the threat of a shutdown, was a weapon to use against Trump—the only real weapon the minority party had, the weapon Republican minorities used again and again to thwart Democratic administrations. The Democrats had refused to abolish the filibuster when Schumer was the majority leader, on the grounds that someday they might be the ones who needed it. Now the House and the public were begging Schumer to use it. And he refused, caught up in the dream that modeling good, reasonable governance would put Trump to shame. The only question he could bring himself to consider was whether fighting for a shutdown might make things worse. Yet if the Senate failed to fight, there was no chance to make anything better.
