Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) isn’t facing the threat of a “no confidence” vote. His members aren’t openly rebelling on the Senate floor.
But the cold, hard math that is causing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) problems with his right flank is shared by his Democratic counterpart in the Senate.
REPUBLICAN PRIMARY: BIG TENT OR BIG TOP?
Even as McCarthy had to cancel votes for the rest of the week on Wednesday over a group of conservatives protesting his debt ceiling compromise with the White House, Schumer had to cancel a vote of his own to confirm a judge nominated by President Joe Biden.
There was no drama associated with the cancellation — Sen. Patty Murray’s (D-WA) absence due to a sinus infection prompted it to be rescheduled.
But the fact that a single missing senator could derail the confirmation of a nominee underscores how Schumer, in some sense, shares the same challenge as McCarthy: governing with a threadbare majority.
McCarthy’s speakership has come to be defined by his rocky relationship with a couple dozen conservatives seemingly never satisfied with his leadership.
That dynamic is not new in Republican politics — GOP speakers for years have been forced to overcome unruly hard-liners pushing them to govern as far to the Right as possible.
But those conservatives have outsize power in this Congress. With only a four-seat majority in the House, they have veto power over anything making its way through the chamber. They nearly denied McCarthy the speaker’s gavel in January.
That perennial conflict has ground business in the House to a halt as McCarthy faces blowback for negotiating a weaker-than-hoped-for deal to raise the debt ceiling.
But Schumer has not gotten by unscathed in his own tenuous control of the chamber.
Republicans have managed to peel off a number of Democrats to pass legislation this year in a Senate he controls 51-49. At other times, they’ve been successful in tanking Biden’s more controversial nominees.
That’s not to say Schumer’s in anything like the predicament McCarthy finds himself in. There is no brewing mutiny.
But he has the opposite problem as McCarthy — it’s the centrists in his caucus who are giving him grief.
The latest headache is his inability to move the nomination of Julie Su, the acting labor secretary whom Biden wants to appoint on a permanent basis.
Two Democrats and one independent stand in the way of her confirmation: Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Jon Tester (D-MT), and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ).
All three are undecided, but Schumer would have scheduled the vote already if she could get confirmed.
“I mean, you don’t have to be Euclid to know that when you have the votes, you take the vote,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told the Washington Examiner.
The holdup is becoming a feature of Schumer’s own tenure as majority leader. It took Eric Garcetti 20 months to become ambassador to India, while there’s starting to be a “graveyard” of Biden picks whose nominations had to be pulled over lack of support.
Manchin and Sinema, in particular, have bucked the party line, as they have for years. But a growing number of swing-state Democrats have joined them with 2024 looming.
Until recently, those defections were compounded by the absence of Sens. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who missed weeks of votes due to health ailments.
With Republicans bringing up countless “disapproval resolutions” to roll back Biden’s regulatory agenda, a type of measure guaranteed a floor vote, Schumer is suffering from a kind of loss of control that McCarthy himself is surely feeling.
The Democratic defections aren’t a rebuke of Schumer, per se. The fact is, centrists are going out of their way to create daylight between themselves and Biden, given his status as the standard-bearer of the party.
But that doesn’t mean Schumer has unity in his conference or even a lack of drama. Sinema put a fine point on her own dissatisfaction with Democrats when she left the party in December to become an independent. The move put a damper on Schumer’s victory lap after he expanded his Senate majority by one seat in the midterm elections.
Sinema chuckled to herself and kept on walking when asked on Thursday what she thinks of Schumer’s leadership. Manchin avoided answering the same question.
But there’s no parallel to the kind of bad-mouthing of McCarthy on display in the House.
Part of that comes down to a difference in culture between the two chambers. The House is known for being rowdy — just rewatch Democrats scoff at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) when she called for decorum the other week. The Senate, by contrast, is often called the cooling saucer that moderates the House.
But it’s also a matter of temperament between the two parties. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) faced his first-ever leadership challenge in November, meant to register conservatives’ discontent with his bipartisan streak in the Senate.
Ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) did have to fend off grumbling from the Democratic rank and file after 20 years as the House’s top Democrat. She and her deputies ultimately stepped down in November to clear the way for a new generation of leadership.
But Schumer is a decade younger and has only led his caucus since 2017.
The majority leader is loathe to push major legislation ahead of 2024, fearing anything controversial could become an obstacle in what promises to be an already difficult Senate map for Democrats.
Similarly, McCarthy is content to pass messaging bills in a divided government.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
But for must-pass legislation like the debt ceiling bill, the compromise McCarthy struck hurt his credibility, while it helped Schumer’s.
McCarthy wound up with a conservative revolt on his hands, while Schumer got the chance to reward Manchin’s support when it counted the most: He got the Mountain Valley Pipeline approved in exchange for Manchin’s vote last year on Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
