Chuck Schumer’s Failure Theater

Senator Schumer’s brinksmanship with congressional Republicans strikes a discordant note with us after the Brooklynite announced Wednesday that he would try to block President Trump’s preferred government funding agreement just to try to prove himself an activist for his party’s liberals. The Democratic leader’s move, which was plotted behind closed doors at a lunch meeting Wednesday, is already proving to be failure theater of the first water. The state of play, our Matt Rice reports, is fairly simple. Republicans, having won trifecta control of the three branches, are trying to right the ship after the Biden administration, when congressional Democrats backed bloated spending bills that kept the government open through March 14. Attempting to cut a bit of that money — just under $8 billion to be exact — Republicans are aiming for a spending agreement that gets them to September. After nearly a week of hemming and hawing, Mr. Schumer announced in a brief speech on the Senate floor that he would not supply the Democratic votes necessary to break the filibuster and allow for passage of the bill. It is a futile effort, we believe, given the lack of possible off-ramps and the irresponsibility of a potential shutdown, at the very moment Democrats claim to be fighting for federal employees in the rich counties around Washington.The New York senator’s petulance at this moment marks an especially sad chapter, given how often he has complained about a lack of bipartisanship in Congress’s upper chamber. He has so far failed to lay out a unifying case for anything, never mind precise demands about what exactly he wants from the White House in exchange for his votes beyond a short, 28-day extension in funding so some kind of “bipartisan” agreement can be found.That agreement, however, includes potential language in the spending bill which would force the president to disburse funds even if he finds that spending to not be in the national interest. Mr. Schumer’s Democratic colleagues on the other side of the Capitol in the House made those same demands of the Appropriations Committee chairman, Congressman Tom Cole — demands that were rejected by both Mr. Cole himself and the House writ large.Think of what Mr. Cole told our Mr. Rice and other reporters just two days ago. “Do you think a Republican House [and] a Republican Senate is gonna send language that limits a Republican president [whose] name is Donald Trump, and expect him to sign it? That’s your position?” Mr. Cole asked rhetorically. “It’s not politically possible, and I don’t think we ever asked them to do things that were politically impossible when the roles were reversed.”What this moment marks is the need for leadership in the Senate that recognizes the fiscal crisis and is prepared to seek a unifying solution. That, it turns out, has never been a goal for Mr. Schumer, which is no doubt one of the reasons the voters sent him back into the minority. This is a moment in which he could have led and failed to do so. To use Mr. Cole’s own parlance, Mr. Schumer is now demanding an impossible restriction of presidential power all for the sake of appearing to have some fight left in him.

Chuck Schumer’s Failure Theater

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