Have you watched the recent viral video of Chuck Schumer shouting that he wants to change the world? Last weekend, after networks called the presidential election for Joe Biden, the Democrats’ Senate leader took to the street to celebrate with a noisy crowd.
His brief utterances at the gathering had the usual hollow, awkward quality that his attempts at stirring rhetoric usually do. His tone rises as though to conclude the peroration of a triumphant speech, but it falls flat. He is no Pericles. His actual words were dramatic, though. “Now we take Georgia, then we change the world,” he declared, as though he were Gen. Sherman marching on Atlanta. Not realizing the regional resonance of “taking Georgia” but noticing that he was on camera, he put on his mask, pumped his fist, and boomed, “Now, we take Georgia, then we change Americaaaa!”
By taking Georgia, Schumer means winning two Senate seats that are up for grabs in runoff races in the Peach State on Jan. 5. If the blue party nabs them, they’ll have 50 seats, equal to the Republicans, and the deciding vote in the chamber will belong to the vice president — Kamala Harris.
What does Schumer mean by change Americaaaa? Democrats want to use control of the Senate, if they get it, to pack the Supreme Court with left-wing judges who’ll allow them to run roughshod over constitutional limits on federal power. Then they’ll grow government into something unrecognizable to a free society. They want to use Senate control, no matter how slim, to make states of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, thereby adding four unassailable Democratic seats. They intend to scrap the filibuster so legislation can pass with a simple majority, so they can ram through extreme left-wing policies such as big tax increases on the middle class — it’ll be presented as making billionaires pay their “fair share” — and climate and energy policies that will chop the economy and general prosperity off at the knees.
But why does Schumer want to change Americaaaa? The truth is that he probably doesn’t. He’s calling for such change to pander to left-wing radicals. Why? Because he’s sphincter-twitching terrified that one of them, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, will run against him in the 2022 primary because he’s a fuddy-duddy old geezer, and she’s a sparkling if ignorant rising star. In other words, Schumer is faking his support for changing Americaaaa because he’s scared of losing his job. Edifying, no?
This is one of those things that falls into the multitudinous category of shocking but not surprising. It’s shocking, or should be, that one of our most senior political leaders would disingenuously advocate reforms that demolish the nation’s delicate and fantastically effective foundational structure. But it cannot be surprising because so many pols do much the same, changing their beliefs to win election.
Take the late Sen. John McCain. In May 2010, when he was fighting desperately to keep his Senate seat, McCain released a TV ad blaming illegal immigrants for “home invasions and murders.” (Sound familiar?) Reversing his longstanding position against building a border wall, he called for completion of the “danged fence.”
You can see why Winston Churchill endorsed democracy only as the least worst type of government, saying, more precisely, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.” This is because it obliges politicians to secure popular approval, as it should, and prompts them frequently to do terrible things, even things they dislike, in order to stay in office. While Biden is orating about unity, Schumer is tacking fast toward the fringe solely because he daren’t let himself be outflanked to his left by AOC.
Oak trees start as acorns. American socialism may grow out of Schumer’s timidity.
Thus, unless Republican donors step up and help their party fight in Georgia, where gossip has it that just two Senate races could cost $500 million, the Democrats might gain a razor-thin advantage in “the world’s greatest deliberative body” and use it to smash norms that have served America for a quarter of a millennium.
If there is one thing that, more than any other, makes the idea of a Democrat in the White House a prospect that one can tolerate with sanguine equanimity, it is that he will be blocked from that party’s worst excesses by a Republican majority in the Senate. Thus, the political battle of the next two months could decide whether we still recognize America, or we have to start calling it “Americaaaa.”
