King without a crown

Schumer took up the majority leader’s mantle with lofty expectations. Twelve months later, his tenure has proven remarkably inept, incompetent, and ineffective. During his first year, he has been arguably the weakest majority leader in memory, especially compared to his two immediate predecessors, who were among the strongest.

Schumer’s weakness is not entirely of his own making. There is strength in numbers, and he doesn’t have them. Chuck Schumer wanted to be majority leader, and his wish was granted. What he forgot was to ask for a majority. As he’s learning the hard way, it’s not easy being majority leader without one.

Schumer did enjoy some initial successes. Most significantly, he passed, with just Democratic votes, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Later, he shepherded the much-touted bipartisan infrastructure deal through the Senate long before it cleared the House. Any list of his accomplishments as majority leader, however, is notable more for what’s missing. Namely, the two biggest items on President Joe Biden’s agenda: the Build Back Better Act and voting and election reform legislation. Their absences are the cause of much of the angst that has gripped the Democratic Party and the Left for the past six months.

A massive spending bill larded with a grab bag of social and climate policies from the Democratic wish list, BBB was supposed to pass last spring, then last summer, then last fall, and finally in the winter. Right before Christmas, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, on whose verdict its fate depended, announced that he opposed the House version of the bill. BBB was dead. Much progressive ire was directed at him for breaking a supposed promise to support it. Yet Manchin had been clear for months what his parameters for the bill were.

Schumer was aware of those parameters. Politico reported that in July, Manchin proposed a maximum figure of $1.5 trillion for the spending bill, a number codified in a written agreement signed by both men. Manchin also suggested debate on the bill not begin before Oct. 1. As HuffPost’s Igor Bobic put it, news of the Manchin-Schumer compact “landed like a bombshell on Capitol Hill.” And no wonder. Manchin’s colleagues had been eyeing a $3.5 trillion bill. Now, they faced the prospect of seeing that lofty price tag dispatched to the abattoir, and their most grandiose plans with it.

Manchin made an easy target for the displeasure of progressives and his fellow Democrats. Yet his reluctance to endorse the most ambitious version of the spending bill was no secret. The real butt of their opprobrium should have been Schumer. He’d known Manchin’s bottom line for months, yet kept it hidden, thereby creating a distorted understanding of the state of the BBB negotiations within his own caucus and among the base. His handwritten addendum that he would “try to dissuade Joe on many of” their accord’s provisions reads like nothing so much as a bit of posterior covering.

Much of what Democrats have done since Manchin pulled the plug on BBB can be described the same way. With their agenda moribund, they needed to salvage something to prevent a year that had started with such high hopes from ending a near bust. Having tried nothing and all out of ideas, they decided the solution to their dilemma was to shift their focus from an issue that was going nowhere fast to one that was already there: voting and election reform.

The Democrats had introduced several bills that they contended would protect voting rights and combat voter suppression at the state level by, among other things, mandating early voting and loosening voter ID requirements. Rejecting this legislation as tantamount to a federal takeover of elections, Republicans blocked consideration of it in the Senate on multiple occasions.

The Democrats promised to make one last push before Congress decamped for Christmas, but that turned out not to be enough time. So, Schumer vowed that enacting their election legislation and implementing the rules changes necessary to pass it would be the first order of business when the Senate reconvened in the new year.

The extra weeks, ideally, would allow them to overcome their primary obstacle: Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Time and again, the centrist Democrats had reiterated their opposition to altering the filibuster. Perhaps, finally, the two holdouts would relent. Unless they did, the bills would fail once more.

Hoping to capitalize on the symbolism of Martin Luther King Day, Schumer scheduled the final confrontation for that holiday. He even found a procedural maneuver that would let him bypass the first phase of Republican obstruction. But the gods, possibly wishing to prolong his agony (or merely their amusement), delayed proceedings; Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz tested positive for COVID, and a massive winter storm froze Washington. The end game would now play out two days later.

All these interruptions did was postpone the inevitable. As he had promised to do, Schumer proposed revising Senate rules via majority vote to limit the filibuster for voting rights legislation. And as they’d sworn to do, Manchin and Sinema refused to press the button on the so-called nuclear option to modify it. The Democratic program lay in tatters. As did Schumer’s authority and credibility, both of which he had squandered on a gambit that was destined for failure.

If the result was “entirely predictable,” as Politico put it, why go through the motions at all? Largely because congressional Democrats felt compelled to. The doomed tactic was necessary to demonstrate to the rank and file their commitment to the cause of voting rights and that they’d done all they could to thwart new voting laws passed by Republican state legislatures. Moreover, faced with the demise of most of their agenda and coming off the BBB debacle, they needed to save some portion of it, or at least show activists they’d made every attempt. Surrendering without firing a shot on an issue of such importance to black voters, one of the party’s core constituencies, was “f***ing untenable,” the pollster Cornell Belcher told the Los Angeles Times.

Yet their defeat here reinforced an impression of futility and disarray. From criminal justice to immigration to gun control, the Democratic agenda had been at a standstill for months. Now, its social and climate policy legislation and voting reform bills have gone down in flames.

The switch to voting rights after BBB flopped exemplified the lack of strategy and planning at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. The Democrats moved from something they had 50 votes for and could pass with just 50 to something that needed 60 votes and for which they didn’t even have 50, given the need to change Senate procedure to pass it. As a perplexed Economist mused, “What better way to chase one humiliating setback and waste of political capital than with another?”

As president, Biden understandably gets most of the blame, not least since he did prioritize infrastructure and his social and climate policy bill over voting reform. Yet Schumer shouldn’t be denied his share, as his mismanagement helped lead Democrats into the impasse they now find themselves in.

The former New York assemblyman averred repeatedly when he initiated the decisive showdown on the filibuster that he didn’t want to delude anyone that changing it would be easy. Yet arguably, that’s exactly what he did for months, first on BBB and then on voting rights, simply by pretending he could pass versions of either that never would.

Schumer might have wanted, in his words, “everyone put on record” because “the eyes of history are upon us.” But how putting Democratic senators who face tough reelections this year on the spot, or alienating Sinemanchin, whose votes he’d still need for a resurrected BBB, would bring him closer to his goal was never clear.

The more Schumer affirmed his commitment to bringing voting legislation to the floor, the more hapless he looked. All he achieved was to generate one headline after another about how quixotic and “illogical” his quest was because Sinema and Manchin wouldn’t budge on changing the filibuster.

A week before the vote, Biden was scheduled to meet with Senate Democrats in the Capitol to discuss the path forward. Before he arrived, Sinema took to the Senate floor to proclaim that she would not approve any derogation of the 60-vote threshold. Not only was Schumer’s stunt over before it began, but he couldn’t even prevent one of his members from upstaging, even undermining, a president of the same party. There could hardly be a greater testament to his debility.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by Schumer’s struggles. Before he became majority leader, he was arguably best known as the subject of the popular D.C. quip, “The most dangerous place in Washington is between Chuck Schumer and a camera.” Whatever his talents, legislative and parliamentary mastery have never been numbered among them. Neither, despite their long association, would anyone accuse him of possessing the cutthroat ruthlessness of Harry Reid.

If he did, maybe he wouldn’t be scared, as Washington insiders murmur, of a primary challenge from the Left; or in thrall to Silicon Valley donors who, it was reported, may have been the real force behind the shambolic filibuster and voting rights scramble. Instead, for want of a modicum of Reid’s steely realism, he wound up not the midwife of his party’s aspirations but their undertaker.

Chuck Schumer desired all his life to be Senate majority leader. Forty years after he entered Congress, his wish came true. Yet like someone who asks for eternal life but neglects to request eternal youth to go with it, he left something out. So, he has found himself presiding over the longest 50-50 Senate in history. And a 50-50 majority, as he and his fellow Democrats have discovered to their considerable frustration, is hardly any majority at all.

As a consequence, his tenure may wind up an ignominious failure. But if it does, it should at least be a short one. The way things are going for the Democrats, it’s likely to be over a year from now. Perhaps Chuck Schumer should have been more like Moses after all.

Varad Mehta (@varadmehta) is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area.