When Republicans captured the House from Democrats in 2010, the most conservative members and activists took it as a cue to oppose President Obama without compromise. It stretched Speaker John Boehner between the many hardline members of his caucus and the need to govern with a Democrat in the White House—and eventually ripped apart his tenure.
Eight years later, the roles are reversed—House Democrats ascendant, Republicans on the decline, Donald Trump in the Oval—and Democratic leaders in Congress seem destined to experience similar stress to Boehner and that of his successor, Paul Ryan. The most observable hint, though, is not in the House, where Nancy Pelosi already has cut deals with dissenting voices in her ranks to ensure her return to the speakership. It’s in the Senate, where leader Chuck Schumer is taking heat from both southwestern Democrats and the progressive grassroots for his position on border security negotiations.
Senate Democrats favor including $1.6 billion of funds for the southern border in a spending resolution to avert a government shutdown at the end of this week. The number was not invented after the November elections—it was written into a Homeland Security appropriations bill in June, which Schumer now says in December would pass with bipartisan support. The amount would go toward “approximately 65 miles of pedestrian fencing along the southwest border in the Rio Grande Valley,” the legislation specifies.
The modest length and the conditions of its construction are familiar. The “pedestrian fencing” must meet the same structural requirements specified in the omnibus appropriations bill enacted in March, which provided $1.3 billion for “operationally effective designs deployed as of the date of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017 … such as currently deployed steel bollard designs.” Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer acknowledged the difference between such designs and Trump’s preference for a solid wall in May 2017, when Congress approved the relevant act. It contained $314 million for border fencing, which Spicer called “a down payment on what the president is going to prioritize in the 2018 budget”: in other words, a wall.
Of course, Trump hasn’t gotten one. What he’s received instead are snack-sized portions of border security funds for limited activity. They derive from the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which was bipartisan. If anything, the recent bills appropriating money for fencing have been more controversial among Republicans than Democrats. Despite being in a total minority, Schumer’s party—with a little help from Trump’s self-sabotage, when a deal on DACA and the border fell through in March—has effectively kept the wall down.
But that’s no longer good enough among a loud segment of newly empowered Democrats and progressives. Texas representative Henry Cuellar wrote Schumer last week “to express … alarm and opposition to your comments that $1.6 billion for a physical wall along the border is the starting negotiating position for Democrats.” In one respect, Cuellar is guilty of the same case of mistaken identity as President Trump, who has insisted to his supporters that border security funds Congress has approved for fencing are, in fact, for a literal wall. Except in Trump’s case, he’s trying to reassure his base. Cuellar is trying to alarm his.
Schumer’s office attempted to tamp down the concern. “This is much ado about nothing,” his spokesman told Politico. The New York Democrat told Cuellar by phone that the media were misrepresenting what the $1.6 billion could be used for. And most importantly, he’s opposed to Trump’s own starting point for conversations, which is $5 billion.
It’s become clear, however, that any amount above $0 is unacceptable to many on the left. The activist class weighed in on Twitter, which the progressive website Common Dreams rounded up here. The New Republic, critical of Schumer’s stance, wrote that Democrats have “the ability to stymie funding for an expensive, impractical, and offensive symbol of xenophobia and nativism,” given their House majority—as if they haven’t effectively exercised that ability already.
This is but a taste of the grief Schumer gets: In light of his comments on the spending negotiations, the left has begun to reassess his support of even the most noncontroversial Trump nominees, like Defense Secretary James Mattis (98 yea votes) and former Veterans’ Affairs Secretary David Shulkin (unanimous), as Think Progress wrote. Internal dissent can keep leaders honest. But it can topple them when it becomes wholesale and inflexible.
That means the Democrats’ progressive faction is not in the mood to deal with Trump. How mismatched, since Trump said from the start that he was in the mood to deal with Schumer. “I think I’ll be able to get along well with Chuck Schumer. I was always very good with Schumer,” he said in January 2016.
“It’s important that you get along. It’s wonderful to say you’re a maverick and you’re going to stand up and close up the country and all of the things, but you have to get somebody to go along with you.”
Schumer may need to be of a different mindset to keep his job.
