Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) had an interesting thread trying to explain the logic of why Chuck Schumer and several other Senate Democrats voted in favor of cloture on the GOP spending bill and averted a government shutdown. Whitehouse voted against cloture, but his object is to explain why some of his colleagues went the other way in good faith (i.e., not just because they're spineless capitulators). The short version is that a shutdown gives Trump greater power to accelerate the program closures and evisceration of disfavored government entities, and would even give him a veneer of legality that isn't present now. For Whitehouse, that risk is outweighed by the need to plant one's feet and take a stand now -- crystallizing the crisis the Trump administration has created and clearly fighting back against it -- but Whitehouse doesn't think it's impossible for someone in good faith to think the other way.
The Whitehouse thread is obviously meant to be a counterbalance to the growing anger being directed at Schumer from the Democratic base, who see him as an ineffectual leader incapable of mounting the resistance necessary against the Trump administration. How fair is the latter charge? To some extent, I think it depends on whether you think the role of the Senate Minority Leader is outward or inward facing.
If the role is outward facing, then Chuck Schumer's job is to be an exponent of the Democratic Party's message to the public, galvanizing the base and convincing others to rally against the Trump regime. Arguably, with Democrats out of the White House, he and Hakeem Jefferies are the two most powerful Democrats in the country and de facto co-leaders. People look to them to see what the alternative to Trump would be.
It is hard, I think, to dispute that if that is the job of the Senate Minority Leader, then Chuck Schumer has been bad at it. He has not been an effective messenger for the Democratic Party. He does not inspire the base. Nobody in the public looks to him for leadership.
However, there's a solid case to be made that the job of the Senate Minority Leader is not supposed to be outward facing. We are not a parliamentary system; the legislative head of the opposition party is not the prime minister waiting in the wings. When you think of the next generation of Democratic Party leaders -- the potential presidential candidates -- Chuck Schumer is not on that list, nor has he indicated any interest in being on that list. The folks who we should be looking at in terms of outward, public-facing Democratic messaging are folks like Tim Walz, Josh Shapiro, AOC -- people we can imagine running a presidential campaign. The role of Senate Minority Leader is inward-facing -- it is about governing a legislative caucus and figuring out how to orient that caucus towards a cohesive and effective legislative strategy.
Under this telling of the Schumer's role, I think the report card has to be considered more mixed. I am astounded by how many people had unreasonably high expectations of what Schumer could accomplish with a zero-seat majority anchored by at least two extremely mercurial actors; I think objectively speaking he did an incredible job. In his last stint in the minority, there likewise were simply absurd expectations over what he could plausibly accomplish (people thinking he just "let" the Senate confirm Brett Kavanaugh, for instance). And particularly in an inward-facing role, there's a solid case that part of Schumer's job is to take bullets for the rest of his caucus -- doing tactically necessary but unpopular things so that the public-facing leaders can keep a clean record. Even if Schumer is right about the relative demerits of letting the government shutdown, it was clear that any ambitious Democrat who acceded to the cloture vote has probably kneecapped their future prospects. In that case, Schumer's job is to take the righteous fire from the base so that other Democrats -- ones who are viable presidential contenders or who are outward-facing messengers -- remain pure. The willingness to do that, more than anything, is as far as I can tell the reason why Schumer has retained the support of his caucus even in the face of widespread external discontent.
All that said, it is entirely plausible to believe that right now Schumer hasn't figured out a good legislative strategy for his caucus either -- that he's failing in the inward-facing role. Some of that debate also returns us to Whitehouse's description of the split in the caucus -- is now the time to plant one's feet and do pitched battle; or is it still better to try to maneuver for position? This, I think, is a more reasonable way of framing the current divide amongst Democrats that is sometimes presented as "fighters" versus "appeasers"; but I say that with a lot of sympathy towards team "fight". After all, saying one "has a plan", delaying action yet again to "maneuver" into a better position -- these can rapidly simply become excuses for inaction and quiescence. Once you cut away the paranoid underbrush where Schumer is deliberately selling out his party because he's closet-MAGA, this is far and away the strongest argument against Schumer as Senate Minority Leader from the inward-facing perspective -- that he's making serious tactical misjudgments by an unwillingness to commit to a pitched battle when Democrats need to show they're standing firm.
Where do I land on this? As alluded to above, Schumer has caught to my mind unreasonable fire for a long time; I've been far more forgiving of him in his leadership role than many of my peers. But one of my lodestone political beliefs (this was my take on the vice presidential nomination too) is that nobody "deserves" a role like Senate Minority Leader. There's no fairness here, no deserts. Maybe it's silly for people to look at the Senate Minority Leader as an outward facing role, but it seems like they are, and in that capacity Schumer has completely lost the trust of the base and doesn't have any particular cachet with "moderates" or "independents" to make up for it. And on the inward-facing side, again, even painting Schumer's strategy in the best light and giving him the benefit of the doubt, I'm inclined to credit Whitehouse's belief that Democrats needed to pick this fight and do it clearly. Perhaps that's me having blinders on and just desperately wanting someone to punch back at Trump; Schumer almost certainly would say I'm not looking at the long game. But my strong instinct is that Democrats need to be punchier, and Schumer is not fitting the bill.
Who would fit that bill -- and do so, importantly, while filling the less visible inward-facing needs of caucus wrangling and legislative strategizing -- isn't totally clear to me. Nominations welcome.
