Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wants to let everyone know that Democrats have entered the lame-duck period of their unified control of the federal government.
The Democratic agenda has hit a wall. Democrats and President Joe Biden got their COVID stimulus bill and their bipartisan infrastructure bill, while Biden’s Build Back Better bonanza went down in flames. After grand promises of change, Schumer is now admitting that Democrats have run out of ideas, as he announced that the Senate will pursue a partisan voting bill that would require eliminating the filibuster.
But Schumer does not have the votes to do that. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have been resolute in their opposition to eliminating the 60-vote threshold, and neither would have much of a reason to reverse their stances now.
Schumer said that the GOP is using the filibuster to “embarrass the will of the majority,” but he is doing a decent job of that on his own. If Schumer follows through with his threat to bring these bills to a vote, he will walk away with several failures and the rest of the Democratic Senate caucus being put on the record about where they stand. Whether he really thinks Manchin and Sinema will suddenly be pressured into flipping positions or he just wants to show that he is “fighting” for liberal activists, the result will be failure all the same.
The fact that Schumer is using his time on this stunt only highlights that Democrats have nothing left to do with their federal trifecta. With rising inflation and COVID cases surging despite Biden’s promise to “shut down the virus,” Democrats are admitting that they have nothing left for this term. They are out of ideas for their transformative agenda, and now Schumer is just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
This isn’t a surprise, especially for someone like Schumer, who has shown himself to be out of his depth as a Senate leader. This amounts to waving the white flag on unified Democratic governance and reminding voters that there never really was a Democratic plan beyond opposing former President Donald Trump.
