Chuck must go. We need actual representation. We need fighters. Not self- 4thinterested surrenderers.
UPDATE 3/16/2025:
UPDATE 03/17/2025:
This partisan legislation, written by Republicans without any input from Democrats, whose votes they needed to overcome the Senate filibuster, gutted billions of dollars of federal programs. We’re talking cuts to health care, cancer research, housing, infrastructure, and veterans’ services. Maybe worst of all, House Republicans used a procedural measure before final passage of the bill that prevents Congress from having to vote on keeping or getting rid of Donald Trump’s deeply unpopular tariffs, which are raising prices and otherwise tanking the U.S. economy.
By the time the final product came to the floor, all except one House Democrat voted against it. At a minimum, it appeared, this vote could have been used against Republicans in the 2026 elections to flip the House and Senate.
But then Sens. Brian Schatz, Catherine Cortez Masto, Dick Durbin, John Fetterman, Kirsten Gillibrand, Angus King, Maggie Hassan, Gary Peters, Chuck Schumer, and Jeanne Shaheen broke from their Democratic colleagues to advance it.
These Senators could have used the filibuster to demand that Republicans come to the table to negotiate a bipartisan agreement. Instead, they folded. In doing so, they became emblematic of a neutered and feckless opposition party that has outraged and demoralized Democratic voters (and donors) since the November election.
[...]
In response to separate questions asking if it was time for new leadership in the Senate, and if he had lost confidence in Schumer, House minority leader and fellow Brooklynite Hakeem Jeffries deflected each time, saying, “Next question.”
[...]
It was worse in the upper chamber, where Senate Democrats are privately mulling replacing Schumer. Before having an aide try to clean up his statement, Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia told the press, “I think come ‘26, ‘28 we’ll get some new leadership.” Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona said he was concerned Democrats had lost their leverage by allowing the bill to move forward. These two men represent some of the swingiest states in America, both of which Trump won in 2024. Their statements should put to rest any notion that Schumer’s vote was really about providing cover to his vulnerable members. In fact, he may have harmed them.
[...]
The nicest thing that can be said is that Schumer and the rest genuinely believed their capitulation was the best path forward for the country. But that perspective only underscores an existential problem for Democrats. Our central, defining task right now is to stand up to a lawless bully in the Oval Office. Even the federal workers who stood to be most directly impacted by a government shutdown understood this; the American Federation of Government Employees urged senators to vote against cloture.
[...]
[L]ast week’s vote won’t be forgotten—because it was the main leverage Democrats in Congress will have for the remainder of the year.
Mondaire Jones @ The Bulwark
Chuck must go. He's not up for reelection until 2028, though. Maybe New York Democrats can recall him?
Ta-Nehisi Coates:
UPDATE 03/18/2025 10:34 am:
They're going to totally destroy the federal government anyway! Especially if the Democrats are going to cave every time they demand something more.
The very definition of insanity.[The] fundamental problem — evident from the catastrophic surrender by nine Senate Democrats to the GOP’s DOGE continuing resolution (CR) bill last week — is a lack of strategy.
[...]
There are plenty of Democrats good at formulating creative insults and getting wide attention for making them. What has been missing for months in DC, however, is a unified Democratic strategy for publicly defining, and relentlessly opposing, the MAGA GOP’s battery of the nation and its most cherished institutions.
[...]
Certainly, Democrats find themselves in a tough spot as a result of last November’s elections, being in the minority in both houses of Congress, as well as losing the White House. But nonetheless, they have played their hand disastrously.
It was clear for months that the March 14 expiration of the continuing resolution that passed in December of last year was going to be the first big opportunity of 2025 — and potentially the last — for Democrats to use the legislative process to push back against the Trump assault.
[...]
In recent weeks, the stakes for the March CR vote increased as the Trump administration’s illegal attacks on the government, the rule of law and the constitutional authority of the Congress became ever more audacious. These events made it all the more clear that Democrats had no choice but to try to score a win with their bad hand of cards.
Meanwhile, thanks to effective pushback from Democrats and others, Trump’s position was weakening. Most importantly, state and local leaders drew attention to Trump’s often nihilistic attacks on the rule of law and essential government services. And state attorneys general — working hand in glove with networks of legal advocacy groups — implemented litigation plans they had been developing and perfecting, in some cases for years, to challenge Trump’s illegal actions in courts throughout the country.
[...]
In many cases, illegal actions, like the mass firing of federal probationary workers, have been challenged in multiple venues (sometimes including both courts and administrative bodies) at the same time. This both increases the chances of success and the attention being paid across the country to the recklessness of the Trump administration’s use of their power to tear down American institutions.
[...]
While anger toward the Trumpers’ nihilism was growing, the March 14 deadline approached. The opposition outside DC reasonably assumed that Democratic leaders in the Senate and House had a coordinated plan in place to meet the moment.
[...]
They were wrong.
In attempting to explain away their surrender of last Friday, Schumer and some of his fellow Democratic senators have unintentionally confessed to their political malpractice — they viewed the March deadline entirely through the lens of budget battles as they have been fought in DC since the 1990s.
The surrendering Democrats based their game plan on the assumption that Republicans would not be able to pass a continuing resolution in the House without Democratic votes.
[...]
Yet there were a number of warnings signs that such a principle was not worth much. The far right’s “commitment” to fiscal austerity long ago became nothing more than a pretense. And just days ago, almost every House Republican, including virtually the entire Freedom Caucus, voted for a profligate budget resolution that calls for increasing the debt limit and massive tax cuts while at the same time promising to impose huge cuts on the neediest and most vulnerable Americans.
[...]
Furthermore, Democrats in both the House and the Senate must have noticed the conspicuous absence of any effort by GOP leaders to open negotiations with them over the terms of a CR even as the days ticked down toward March 14.
[...]
But the surrendering Democrats’ problems went far beyond that. Their key failure was a lack of strategy. There was no indication that Democrats in the two houses of Congress had unified around a goal they hoped to achieve as a result of the CR fight. That is, frankly, both stupefying and unforgivable.
[...]
At a minimum, Democrats should have set out to use the CR process — which was their one near-term opportunity to deploy the filibuster — to demand, and insist, on guardrails that would place a stop to Trump’s illegal course of conduct. Those bottom line demands should have been agreed upon and become part of a carefully planned campaign well before the March 14 deadline.
[...]
Some members of Congress – together with commentators including, for example, Brian Beutler — had been saying as much for weeks and offering up specific ideas, such as a short-term CR packaged together with mandates for ending the DOGE assault, that had to be satisfied for Democrats to vote for longer future funding periods.
[...]
Had Democrats offered up such a bill and presented a unified front in support of it ahead of March 14, Democratic senators would not simply have been in the position of deciding whether or not to vote in favor of a shutdown. Instead, they would have been able to wrong-foot their GOP colleagues about their support for a DOGE “dismantle government services bill” rather than their alternative “keep essential services intact” proposal.
[...]
[B[y choosing a path of passivity, Democrats had left themselves open to a devastating defeat.
[...]
[House Speaker] Johnson sweetened the pot for some of his members by including in the bill a gutting of the budget of Washington DC and an assault on programs for the needy. He also sold it as a mechanism to give Musk and OMB Director Russell Vought a clear runway for the next six month to complete their scheme to dismantle the federal government.
That was all it took to pass the CR on the same party-line vote that had just passed the budget resolution. Then Johnson called the House to a recess and dared Democrats to filibuster the House CR. While Johnson might not be particularly savvy, he calculated that Senate Democrats would ultimately surrender — and he was right.
[...]
In announcing the Democratic cave, Schumer emphasized the parade of horribles that would ensue if the government shut down. He asserted that a shutdown would have given Trump and his cronies license to do great damage to the government.
Schumer’s argument was both somewhat true, but also absurd. On one hand, it’s all but certain that Trump would have tried to leverage a shutdown to further his nefarious ends. But on the other, as the past two months have made clear, Trump does not need a shutdown to destroy the country.
[...]
In this dire moment for the nation and its democratic institutions, the most significant cleavage in the Democratic Party is not ideological but strategic. One cohort of the party is willing — despite the emergency presented — to continue forward in a reactive mode, biding their time with the expectation that Trump’s authoritarian project will peter out on its own.
Public Notice
he larger faction of the party understands, or is beginning to understand, that watchful waiting is neither a cogent nor responsible approach. This is not an argument for “breaking norms” as an end in itself. But it is an argument for taking chances based on rational strategies.
The surrender of March 14 should serve as a model of what not to do. [...] Reactive meekness must be a thing of the past.
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