Poor old Chuck Schumer can’t catch a break these days and shouldn’t catch one either, the old fool. Schumer’s reputation as a crafty and/or soulless specialist in inside the Beltway inside baseball took a massive beating a couple of days ago when Mr. Inside found himself smeared all over the web as Senator Sellout after Schumer agreed to pass the all too Trump friendly continuing resolution crafted by House Speaker Mike Johnson, a surrender that left not only Chuck but the entire Democratic Party with very expensive egg dripping from their eyebrows.
I am one of the few who thinks that Chuck got it right, but even so he drastically failed to let House Democrats know what he was up to, which for some reason has been overlooked in all the commentary I have read on the affair. A classic “Hill” line is supposed to be “You can love me, you can hate me, but please don’t surprise me.” Schumer did the opposite. In what was supposed to be the first big clash of Donald Trump’s second term, which up to this point had been all about Donald n’ Elon, El Chucko laid a big fat egg.
As I said before, I think Chuck made the right call. Historically, it has always been the Republicans who have shut down the government, and it has always been the Republicans who have suffered. One of the truest truisms of politics is this one: “If you have to explain your position, you’ve already lost.” If the Democrats had defeated the continuing resolution, they would have been stuck saying “Yes, we shut down the government, but …”, at which point the entire country would tune them out.
Who do the Democrats have who can stand up to Trump? Surely not Chuck, who would be the man on the spot, because no one outside of DC or New York knows who the hell he is. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez fancies herself the mistress of all media. She has about 13.5 million followers on “X”; Donald Trump has about 102 million. Elon Musk has about 220 million (not a misprint). These are squirt gun versus firehose numbers.
Schumer’s decision was ugly, no doubt. David Dayan at the American Prospect explains why Schumer’s decision, though “correct” (according to me, at least), further weakened the Democrats’ already weak hand:
Thanks to a continuing resolution that passed Congress last week, the government is currently operating under fiscal year 2024 spending levels, but without any specifications on how that money is to be spent. There’s a lump sum available for the Department of Education, for example. But there isn’t any specificity concerning how much of the education budget must go to Title I spending for low-income students, or IDEA spending for schooling students with disabilities, or student loan servicing costs, or anything else. Any of that can be shifted, repurposed, zeroed out in one program and reallocated elsewhere by the Trump administration, as long as the total amount of spending does not exceed the appropriated total.
So, basically, it’s a terrible deal. But what’s doubly terrible is that somehow Schumer “forgot” to tell House Democrats that he was going to swallow it.
But what’s trebly terrible is the icing Chuck added to a cake that I already didn’t want to eat. AV non fave rave Bret Stephens is apparently a Schumer partisan from way back and when Trump, conveniently for Bret, decided to denounce Schumer as only Trump could or would, for being a “Palestinian” and “not Jewish anymore,” Bret hastened to interview Chuck in the wake of the seventy-seven kinds of grief Chuck was catching over the budget surrender so that Chuck could tell everyone what a big winner he was and about all the great things he had been doing in Washington.
Which is fine. But what Chuck said raised more than a few questions in my mind, like “Chuck, which millennium are you living in? Because it sure as hell isn’t the same one as mine.”
Because, among other things, Chuck said this, according to Bret: “My caucus is overwhelmingly pro-Israel,” he [Schumer] insisted to me, noting that when the Senate last year voted for “the largest package of aid to Israel ever, I only lost three Democrats.”
Excuse me, but why is “the largest package of aid to Israel ever” a good thing, when Israel is conducting in Gaza what I most reluctantly can only describe as “genocide” against the Palestinian people?
I don’t mean that Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli military are seeking to murder every Palestinian alive. But it is Netanyahu’s very explicit goal to destroy forever the possibility of a Palestinian state and, what is more, abolish the existence of a Palestinian “people”, scattering to the four winds those who do survive the multiple horrors Israel has heaped upon the residents of Gaza on the racist assumption that all Muslims are, in effect, “fungible” and unworthy of respect or consideration as individual cultures. In his recent speech to the U.S. Congress, Netanyahu explicitly called the “struggle” between Israel and Iran, which he has largely engineered for his own political purposes, “a clash between barbarism and civilization”. And who needs to feel sorry for “barbarians”?
In his interview with Stephens, Schumer says that he is “fiercely proud” of his call last year for Netanyahu to “step down”. But why should or would Netanyahu step down when Schumer is giving him everything he wants and bragging about it? What can Netanyahu say to this other than “send me more enemies like this one”?
Schumer thinks the year is about 1967, when the vast majority of Americans thought that Israel could do no wrong. He simply doesn’t seem to know how the ground has shifted. He thinks that if he keeps AIPAC happy, he can’t lose. In 2022, AIPAC gave money to 37 Republican congressional representatives who voted not to recognize Joe Biden as president elect on January 6, 2021. AIPAC does not believe in democracy in America, or Israel, or Palestine. Schumer is desperately out of touch and living in a fool’s paradise and needs to step down.
