The “Schumer Shutdown” is effectively over, just in time for the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps and Veterans Day. There are still some votes to be taken and a lot of mess to be cleaned up at airports and for SNAP recipients. But the epic failure of this record-breaking federal government shutdown is set in political stone for as long as Schumer will be remembered.
Perhaps one or more of the eight Senate Democrats who threw in the proverbial towel on Sunday felt ashamed for honoring the force and all veterans even as they refused to do their jobs? We will never know their motives, and it is unwise to believe any Democrat’s public explanation for participating in this fiasco. (In fairness, three of the eight who joined the 52 Republicans to reopen the federal government do not deserve the scorn heaped on the 39 Senate Democrats who were rejected.)
The eight (out of 47) senators who witnessed the massacre that millions of people attended through the Schumer Shutdowm and defected are: Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia and Indepentant Senator Angus, King of Maine
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Senators Cortez, Masto, Fetterman and King always voted with Republicans to reopen the government. The reasons why the other five ultimately joined the common sense coalition are unclear, but who knows and who cares?
Congressional Democrats looked and acted like children during this record-breaking escapade. Most voters may not remember this stunt that hurt so many millions of Americans—some of them very badly—but expect the Republican Party to regularly try to remind voters that Democrats shut down the government for a record period because they feared the DSA radicals who have taken over their party in many places and are on the rise in others.
The biggest loser after people actually got hurt or at least inconvenienced by this stunt? The Democratic ‘leader’ in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, by far.
Schumer’s strategy from the start has been to head off a primary challenge from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) in 2028. New York will hold its Democratic presidential primaries on February 1, 2028, so I assume the Senate primaries will also take place that day. Someone skilled in New York election law will have to consider whether AOC can run in either case, but if she does, Schumer will lose the Senate nomination if we go by early elections.
“In a hypothetical contest for the 2028 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in New York, Ocasio-Cortez leads Schumer by a margin of 19 points, 55% to 36%,” according to a Data for Progress poll. It would be reasonable for New York law to allow AOC to run in both races, provided she holds only one office in January 2028, after that fall’s general election. Don’t worry about the details, although Schumer certainly will.
The collapse of his costly “Schumer Shutdown” stunt will haunt Schumer just as a long chain of heavy lock boxes haunted Jacob Marley, the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge’s dead partner in Charles Dickens’ “The Christmas Carol,” forever rattling after a dead Marley – the amount of money he had accumulated in his greedy life.
There are no ghosts, but there are political scars that never fade, and the Schumer Shutdown is one of them. Schumer engineered this stunt and he will have to live with it, even though his predecessor as Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid will always be remembered first and foremost as the man who broke the filibuster and allowed President Donald Trump to nominate three Supreme Court justices and confirm Mitch McConnell with a simple majority after Reid set the precedent of using the nuclear option to change the Senate’s longstanding confirmation rules.
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Reid traded the filibuster for a majority of Democratic nominees on the federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and in return gained the first originalist majority on the Supreme Court.
Chuck Schumer didn’t need a record-breaking vote to undermine turnout in last week’s election, as the two blue states that vote in the odd-numbered year after a presidential election overwhelmed Democrats, as has almost always happened.
Schumer put everyone through this because he thought it would increase his chances of spending another six years in elected office, something he has done since 1975. You read that right. Schumer has been on taxpayers’ payroll for almost 51 years. He’s already guaranteed three, but wants six more, for a total of at least 60! AOC is a threat to Schumer and he is acting irrationally as a result. He damaged his own chances with this circus act that entertained no one. He will pay the price in 2028, if not sooner. How many Democrats in the Senate already realize that they need a new “leader” for the coming cycle?
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What a terrible choice Schumer made. Now, like former Speaker Pelosi, he will be remembered as a politician who hung around for far too long. What has Schumer accomplished? The political equivalent of the Seinfeld Show: a career about nothing, just like the shutdown.
But hey, it’s life.
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