Democrats have always thought Chuck Schumer’s continued use of the flip phone to communicate with his various supporters is a charming eccentricity that shows how dedicated he is to his style of communication.
Many people, both within and outside of the Capitol, are beginning to view his handling of the budget issue as a metaphor for a leader who is out of touch and unable to adapt to the fundamental changes happening in politics around him.
Senate Democrats are still hesitant to publicly criticize the leader, but one stated, “This is not the first time that members of the caucus expressed frustration that he wasn’t as inclusive as he could have been on decision making or strategy, but the stakes of this particular vote were huge.” As a result, the leader is still under scrutiny.
According to AWN’s interviews with dozens of Democratic senators, representatives, and high-ranking staff, support for him has been steadily declining, and many are beginning to believe that he is neither qualified nor worthy to lead the party into the future.
A fellow Democrat senator made the following statement about the next anticipated congressional showdown: “He can’t be trusted alone to negotiate the debt limit.” The senator went on to say, “If he doesn’t lose it between now and then, he won’t be leader in two years.”
Bernie Sanders, a longstanding senator from Vermont who is both an independent and a member of the Democratic caucus, sent out a video to his followers on Friday night in which he characterized the current state of affairs as “an absolute failure of Democratic leadership.” It was “a bad day for our country – and for the Democratic Party,” rookie senator Adam Schiff of California said in a video he sent to his supporters.
According to another Democratic senator, “Schumer ended up looking indecisive” after trying to be overly intelligent.
On Friday, Schumer and nine other Democrats joined him in voting yes, claiming they were choosing the responsible option among two terrible alternatives. The first choice is to pass a budget that allows the Trump administration to keep billions of dollars and slashes spending dramatically. Second, we could have allowed the government to close, which would have left millions of people without access to essential services and tens of thousands of federal employees without pay. This would have been a far more disastrous use of Trump’s presidential power over spending.
There is a mountain of justifications and poor decisions, according to detractors from all over the traditional Democratic spectrum of philosophy, region, and age. Their argument is that the final package is worse than it could have been with stronger opposition because Schumer botched weeks of preparation, effectively negotiating with himself for less. His detractors claim that he delivered more bad news to a party that was already in a precarious position because he botched the internal and external dynamics with his coworkers.
This week’s discussions were certain to be disastrous for Democrats, as any observer could tell you. While Senate Republicans observed how easy it was to include Trump’s demands into legislation, they made no attempt to reach out to Democrats and instead watched as they attacked each other. Many claim that this was Schumer’s leadership that made them look and feel even worse and gave them much less leverage for future fights.
An adviser to a Democratic senator remarked, “The Republicans saw that the Democrats were weak and decided to call their bluff.” The senator’s aide was correct. No one was ever going to come out on top in this. The ‘L’ didn’t need to be so large, though.
Declining trust in the Senate and much more so in the legislative branch as a whole
Several of Schumer’s Democratic senators no longer have trust in her ability to handle the next debates, because Trump obtained exactly the package he wanted with only two Republican votes in the House and Senate combined. As a result, some senators from his own caucus now distrust their fellow lawmakers. Friday left a number of Democratic governors feeling more justified than they had ever hoped for, after privately criticizing Schumer as incompetent for weeks.
In addition to being irritated by the outcome, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was reportedly irritated that Senator Schumer, who usually calls him several times a day to discuss everything from strategy to tweets, barely broached the subject with him regarding any of this in the past few weeks. When asked by AWN on Friday if he believed a change in Senate leadership was necessary, the fellow New Yorker, who always thinks things through before speaking, could only respond with “next question.”
A lot of Democrats are far more critical of Schumer outside of the Capitol.
The Democrats want a leader who can convey their readiness to battle and is also willing to fight for what is right in this very time. According to Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something—an organization that assists younger and more inexperienced Democratic candidates in putting together local campaigns—”I don’t think Senator Schumer has had either.
Schumer has become obsolete, according to the head of a big Democratic-aligned group, who is now afraid to openly speak out for fear of further dividing the party.
According to that source, “the biggest impact of this last week is that from now on, the broad spectrum of the Democratic Party, from the center to the left will be looking to the House for leadership,” as reported by AWN on Friday afternoon.
According to Schumer, he is the only one who is having to face Trump’s reality.
