Zohran Mamdani has won the mayoralty of New York City. It was an incredible come-from-behind victory against Andrew Cuomo, who ran one of the most well-funded campaigns in city history, and was endorsed by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Still, Mamdani’s margin of victory was fairly small—less than ten percentage points—compared to the usual whopping Democratic landslide in this particular contest. One reason for that is a number of nationally prominent New York Democrats refused to endorse their own party’s nominee. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries waffled on the question for months, and only endorsed at the very last minute, while both Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand—who implied Mamdani is a jihadist—and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer refused to do it at all.
And now it turns out Schumer almost certainly voted for Andrew Cuomo. When reporters confronted him directly with the question, Schumer dodged. Do we think he voted for Curtis Sliwa? Come on.
This should be the last straw. Not only is Schumer disloyal to a prominent party member who won the primary fair and square, he is a terrible leader. He should step down as leader of Senate Democrats, and in the likely case that he refuses to do so, other senators should organize to remove him—and he should be primaried in 2028.
This is not remotely the first time that Schumer has put his own personal politics—namely, fervent Zionism (as well as a longtime reliance on Wall Street money)—above the interests of his party. Don’t take it from me, take it from him. “My job,” he told Bret Stephens back in March, “is to keep the left pro-Israel.”
Related: America’s dumbest billionaires fail to stop Zohran Mamdani
Probably the worst example of this came when Schumer attempted to derail President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, on behalf of Israel. He co-sponsored a Republican bill that would require congressional approval for any such deal, though it did not succeed. When then-Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give an address denouncing the proposed deal, Schumer urged congressional Democrats to attend, warmly praised the speech, and then came out publicly against the deal, though it went through anyway.
Trump subsequently killed the nuclear deal—something Schumer was less than upset about—but it should be emphasized that this was President Obama’s marquee foreign-policy goal, as well as a good bargain for both America and Iran. It was, for a few years, a vision of America that could engage in the Middle East with careful diplomacy instead of bombing and committing Thirty Years’ War–esque bloody occupations. Only Israeli hard-liners did not like the deal, so neither did Schumer. His behavior was grotesquely irresponsible.
It should be emphasized that Zionism, in its current ultranationalist form, is intensely racist. Arab citizens of Israel are second-class citizens as a matter of law, while Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have no rights whatsoever, if they aren’t being butchered en masse. That may help explain how Schumer could possibly support Cuomo, whose campaign in its final days descended into some of the worst gutter racism and Islamophobia I’ve seen in years. Occam’s razor: Schumer’s vote for Cuomo shows that he either shares those prejudices or most certainly doesn’t think they’re disqualifying. This is precisely disqualifying, however, for anyone who would be a leader of a deeply multiethnic party, and doubly so for one whose membership has shifted its sympathies from Israelis to Palestinians to the tune of more than 70 percentage points over the last two years.
SCHUMER DOESN’T JUST BETRAY HIS OWN PARTY, he’s also terrible at leading it. He’s a semi-decent caucus manager when there is a Democratic president—he did oversee the passage of President Biden’s enormous climate policy package—but he’s simply inept as an opposition leader. During Trump’s first term, he was doing tired stunts about gas prices that were worn out when he started doing them more than 20 years previously.
Now in Trump’s second term, facing a full-on authoritarian attack on America’s democracy and constitutional structure, Schumer is simply incapable of mounting a determined resistance. When the first government funding confrontation came up in March with a continuing resolution, he caved, voting to break a Senate filibuster, and then against the legislation so he could pretend he didn’t let it through. As my colleague David Dayen explained at the time, this badly dented the legal argument against Trump’s imperial budgeting.
When that continuing resolution expired last month, Schumer faced intense pressure to somehow grow a spine. And indeed, this time Senate Dems did filibuster any continuing resolution, and united around a demand for Republicans to preserve Obamacare subsidies. Somewhat to my surprise, this actually worked quite well on its own terms. Polls showed that most voters blamed Republicans for the shutdown, and the conflict meant the media paid close attention to estimates that Obamacare premiums would more than double on average unless the subsidies are restored.
But after a month of shutdown, about eight to ten Senate Democrats are getting the itch, so characteristic of that wretched institution, to fold like a wet paper sack. Semafor reports that they are considering voting to end the Senate filibuster in return for nothing more than a promise of a vote on Affordable Care Act subsidies, and a few other smaller matters.
On the merits, this is senseless. First, only a fool would trust Donald Trump’s Republican Party to hold its end of any bargain. Second, even if they do, Republicans control the Senate, and can easily vote down any Democratic bill. If that is all they were going to get, there was no point to forcing a government shutdown in the first place.
An important job of any leader is to keep your troops from wavering or retreating in the face of the enemy—and especially so for Senate Democrats, who are about as far from the 101st Airborne as can be imagined. The fact that Schumer can’t stop his coward caucus from conspiring to give up (or is tacitly working with them to give up) is disqualifying in itself.
But more fundamentally, Schumer has barely even tried to communicate the titanic stakes of what is going on. Trump has claimed total power over the federal budget, gutting the core constitutional principle that Congress controls taxation and spending. Even as he goes through the motions of a typical shutdown, hundreds of billions of dollars in congressionally mandated spending is not happening, and he is paying ICE and Army troops through blatantly unconstitutional means. He also refused to spend food stamp backup funds that were legally obligated to be spent—indeed, openly defying a court order to do so—though he later backed down.
Schumer and his caucus’s decision to make this entirely about health care subsidies was a tactical success, but at the same time, it is emblematic of his inability to understand the gravity of the crisis facing him. He and the coward caucus compulsively want to believe that if they pretend hard enough, this will become an ordinary political negotiation. In reality, the Constitution is all but a dead letter, and there is no reason to negotiate on spending with a party that claims Trump gets plenary power over taxation and spending, as King Charles I did in the 1640s, invoking his claims of divine right.
Democrats deserve a congressional leadership that actually believes in “blue no matter who” and knows what century it is.