Chuck Schumer Isn’t Quite the Villain He’s Being Cast As

 

Everybody’s pissed off at Chuck Schumer. His handling of last Friday’s continuing resolution (CR) vote has been widely excoriated, and calls for his head have been loud and rude, as befits the times.

But even before the actual vote, I was thinking that his very public decision to not filibuster the CR — thereby allowing it to pass — was, in fact, the right one.

To be sure, it meant allowing a deeply atrocious bill to become law. The consequences of that bill will need to be addressed, first in court, then in any strategy we can devise to save the country from these repulsive people, but I’ll get back to you on that.

In the meantime, Schumer made his decision with eyes wide open. He expected to take heat for it, and he wasn’t disappointed.

His reasoning is on the record. He says, I think accurately, that if the government were to be shut down, only “essential personnel” could be called in to work, but that it would be up to the executive branch to decide who is or isn’t essential.

It’s for that very reason that the current executive branch has made no secret of its lust for a shutdown, which would give Trump and Musk yet another way to purge the government of anyone they care to label “non-essential,” like air traffic controllers or meat inspectors.

By voting to keep the government open, Schumer avoided that particular catastrophe. And with all the outrage being vented at him, I still haven’t heard a single rebuttal to that argument. Not even a bad one.

But that said, I don’t think he even mentioned the threat that came up most often in the run-up to the vote, which was that Democrats would be blamed for the shutdown.

That threat has largely been waved aside, but I think it needs to be taken more seriously. It would be a big mistake to minimize what “blaming the Democrats” means in this context.

In the right-wing media bubble — where every Democrat is a woke, baby-killing communist who hates America — having Democrats shut down the government would be a propaganda gift of inestimable value.

Consider all the backpedaling Fox has had to do in the last month. They’ve always been far more comfortable attacking Democrats than defending Trump. And now, with Trump’s actions so clearly nuts, their lies get harder and harder to keep track of, let alone sustain. Which makes them look more foolish than usual. When the Wall Street Journal says that the Trump tariffs are stupid, you know that even the Murdochs are getting jittery.

So why give them the gift of a government shutdown that they can spend the next year blaming on Democrats?

Were that to happen, Fox’s propagandists would be once again on the front foot, doing what they do best. They would blame Democrats for the loss of those federal jobs that Musk illegally terminated. They would blame Democrats for the loss of those government services that tens of millions depend on. And — coming soon — they would blame Democrats for the mysterious loss of grandma’s social security check.

Yes, these are all absurd lies, but what else is new? Yes, they would blame Democrats anyway, since that’s what they do. But it’s immeasurably worse when they can point to a government shutdown that Democrats actually “approved” — which is how they’ll spin it — especially when the consequences of such a shutdown would be both devastating and lengthy. If the federal government were to close down, Trump would be in no hurry to reopen it. For all we know, it could stay shut forever.

I repeat, we underestimate — at our peril — just how damaging it can be for Fox to bring the full weight of its media clout down on a single message that reads “Cruel Democrats Shut Down Government!”

We’ve been naïve in thinking that a message like that won’t be believed. The last election gives us ample evidence that it will. We shudder to think there are so many gullible rubes out there, but the fact is the target audience for right-wing propaganda hasn’t changed.

Fox will still be operating in the same alternative universe, peddling the same kinds of alternative facts, talking to the same eighty million reprogrammable zombies who so foolishly voted for Trump, many of them three times. Many, if not most, of them will soon be much sadder, though perhaps no wiser, as the personal consequences of this rolling coup become more evident with each day.

There are, perhaps, millions of such zombies living in the Fox bubble who will soon be totally screwed, and in multiple ways. Part of their imminent screwing will come from the treachery lurking in the CR bill that was just passed, a bill loaded with poison pills that will strike at the heart of our institutions, our economy, and our Constitution.

But all that was happening anyway — on a dozen other fronts — and the last thing we want to see is Democrats taking the rap for it. So why let Fox shift the narrative away from the high crimes and lunacies — which keep getting harder to explain away — and onto a shutdown that will take up all the oxygen and make them look like the good guys.

There is much talk among Democrats, much of it blasé, demanding that our elected leaders “grow a spine,” that they stand up for democracy, that they defend the rule of law, that they stop the deportations and the purges and the tariffs and would somebody please do something about Elon Musk?

I agree that Democrats have been slow to understand that they’re in a war, but this CR bill was not the hill to die on. It’s Republicans, not Democrats, wallowing in this cesspool of their own making. We need to make them own it.

In deciding to do just that — and to take the heat for it — Schumer gave cover to feistier Democrats, like Adam Schiff and AOC, who can now indignantly denounce the decision, though even they can’t be so sure it was wrong. They may even breathe a small sigh of relief that the blame is still where it belongs.

But whatever one thinks of Schumer, his decision didn’t come from villainy, cowardice, or capitulation. It came from sound reasoning and cold political calculation. He was faced with a lose-lose proposition, and you might say he took one for the team.

Which does not mean I give him a pass. He has shown us neither the urgency nor the fire we need in — as some have put it — a “wartime consigliere.”

But it’s not just him, it’s that whole generation of senators who don’t seem to recognize the dimensions of the threat we face. With the notable exceptions of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and a few others who have stepped up their game, they are past their sell-by dates, and they need to move out of the way.

The times are calling — screaming actually — for leaders who are younger, bolder, and much, much angrier.