Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) insisted on Tuesday tat he is the “best leader for the Senate,” pushing back on fellow Democrats who are questioning his leadership after he backed the GOP spending bill to avert a government shutdown last week.
Schumer voiced support and ultimately voted for the continuing resolution to fund the federal government through September 30 despite near unanimous opposition to the bill among both House and Senate Democrats. The Democratic leader was pushing for a 30-day continuing resolution as late as last week, insisting Republicans did not have the support for a longer term spending bill. On the eve of the Friday vote, he changed course, announcing that the Republican backed bill was preferable to a shutdown. With enough support from Senate Democrats, the funding bill passed before the midnight deadline.
Facing furious Democratic backlash for his vote in favor of the spending bill, Schumer essentially told his detractors he is going nowhere.
“We have a lot of good people,” he said on CBS Mornings. “But I am the best at winning Senate seats. I’ve done it in 2005. Just in 2020, no one thought we’d take back the Senate. Under my leadership, we took it.”
Schumer argued the government shutdown would have been “ten times worse” than passing the partisan measure. If a shutdown went into effect over the weekend, the minority leader worried the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency would have been given free rein to cut back on executive agencies they deem nonessential for six to nine months.
“We would have had half the federal government we have now,” he said on the CBS News morning program. “So I thought I did the thing a leader should do: Even when people don’t see the danger around the curve, my job was to alert people to it — and I knew I’d get some bullets.”
By voting for the GOP spending bill, Schumer maintained he was doing the right thing for the American people.
“I knew when I took this vote there’d be a lot of protests, but I felt I had to do it for the future, not only of the Democratic Party, but the country,” he added.
The interview comes one day after Schumer’s tour for his new book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning, was postponed due to security concerns in response to backlash from his vote to keep the government funded for the next six months. The tour would have kicked off this week with numerous events scheduled to take place in Maryland, New York City, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and California.
Anti-Israel activists organized protests outside Schumer’s book tour stops, including one in Baltimore scheduled for Monday evening.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) has been floated among Democrats as a potential primary challenger for the Senate minority leader’s seat in 2028. Schumer dismissed the progressive lawmaker’s potential primary run.
“That’s a long time away,” the 74-year-old Democratic senator told the New York Times in an interview published Sunday. “I am focused on bringing Trump’s numbers down, his popularity down, exposing what he has done to America and what he will do. That’s my focus right now. You know, three years from now is a long way to speculate. I believe that my hard work against Trump will pay off.”