The Senate minority leader’s convictions may be in the right place, but he has never evinced the courage required to defend them.
Say what you will about the progressive left, their scathing assessment of Chuck Schumer’s political talents is hard to argue against.
The Senate minority leader trotted out a new talking point this week, in which the New York Democrat attempted to portray Donald Trump as a capitulatory squish with regard to the ongoing negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program.
“When it comes to negotiating with the terrorist government of Iran, Trump’s all over the lot,” Schumer observed. “One day he sounds tough, the next day he’s backing off. And now, all of a sudden, we find out that Witkoff and Rubio are negotiating a secret side deal with Iran.”
The senator is likely referring to a Monday report via Axios’s Barak Ravid, in which it is alleged that the U.S. negotiating team is, with some amendments at the margins, attempting to recapitulate Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.
“What kind of bull is this?” Schumer reeled incredulously. “They’re gonna sound tough in public and then have a side deal that lets Iran get away with everything? That’s outrageous.”
“Any side deal should be before Congress and, most importantly, the American people,” he continued. “If TACO Trump is already folding, the American public should know about it. No side deals.” (“TACO” — Trump Always Chickens Out — is an acronym floating around Wall Street that refers to the president’s tendency to retreat from his global trade war when markets swoon.)
There’s plenty of room to criticize the president for folding on his administration’s oft-stated commitment to strip Iran of any indigenous uranium enrichment capability. At least, there will be if and when he caves. But Trump hasn’t caved yet. It is, however, rich to hear Schumer issue preening lectures about the irresponsibility of providing the Islamic republic a lifeline as though the senator has a record of standing on that principle. He doesn’t.
After a prolonged period during which the senator claimed to be “studying” the issue, Schumer became one of only two Senate Democrats (along with disgraced former Senator Bob Menendez) to vocally oppose the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015. Schumer would love it if that were all you remember about this period.
Sure, Obama loyalists were bitter over it. Schumer would “put nation on war path,” a headline via the left-wing activist group MoveOn declared. Former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer sounded a note of feigned concern over the extent to which “siding with the GOP” would imperil Schumer’s standing within his caucus. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest wouldn’t say that Schumer was “making common cause with hardliners in Iran,” an alliance he claimed the GOP had forged with the theocrats in Tehran. But he did dismiss Schumer’s concerns as “ideologically driven.”
This badgering might have been relatively gentle, but Schumer still wilted under the pressure. He still opposed the deal and promised to vote “yes” on a GOP-backed “motion of disapproval,” but the future Democratic leader was careful to assure his colleagues that he would not lobby his Democratic colleagues in favor of his position. And when Democrats worked themselves up into a contrived froth over the impertinence Benjamin Netanyahu displayed when he came to Congress to impress upon lawmakers how bad the deal was, Schumer found his opportunity to blink.
When the GOP’s “disapproval” motion failed, despite his half-hearted support for that effort, Schumer heaped praise on the Obama administration’s labors — the fruits of which he supposedly opposed. “Regardless of how one feels about the agreement,” he said at the time, “fair-minded Americans should acknowledge the president’s strong achievements in combating and containing Iran.”
When Trump came into office promising to withdraw the United States from the JCPOA, Schumer changed his tune. “I had a great deal of misgivings about the Iran nuclear deal,” he confessed. “I voted against it, but now we ought to see, give it time to work.”
By 2022, Schumer welcomed the resurrection of the deal he once found so objectionable. “There were problems with the Iran deal originally, and many of us have urged in these discussions the Biden administration [to] deal with those problems, but I think the discussions are important and good,” he told reporters that March.
Schumer’s convictions may be in the right place, but he has never evinced the courage required to defend them. And now, he has the temerity to accuse the president of lacking the intestinal fortitude to do what is necessary in relation to the Iranian nuclear program? Who is he trying to fool?