Ben Curtis/AP Photo
Chuck Schumer exemplifies a conflict-averse spirit in the Democratic Party.
After Kamala Harris’s loss last year, professional Democrats with moderate politics prepared for their favorite quadrennial sport: recrimination. They wanted to “take back” the party from the self-imagined villains they oppose. They wrote manifestos and donor memos and positioned themselves against “the groups.” Just a couple of weeks ago, they organized a retreat where they condemned “ideological purity tests” as their path to a brighter future.
I’m struck by how irrelevant that all sounds, less than two months into Donald Trump’s second term. It feels like these people are arguing about proper salad fork etiquette while their house is on fire. There’s a much more elemental question animating Democratic politics at the moment, if you bother to listen to people who still call themselves Democrats (or even independents): Is the party in opposition to Donald Trump going to oppose anything?
We saw this week what in retrospect was a predictable answer to that question. House Democrats, who face voters every two years, who must pay attention to the public mood, saw the government funding deadline as an early and important moment of defiance against the ransacking of America. They didn’t come to it on the basis of being progressive or moderate, in a safe seat or a swing district. They listened to their voters, who were looking for some sign of life among Democrats, or a plan to stanch the bleeding of an economic and moral collapse.
But Trump is also a great uniter of his own side, and he was able to pull the Freedom Caucus in on a spending bill for the first time in ages by promising he would continue to impound and delete programs regardless of what the bill said. Happy to outsource the carnage and the responsibility, all Republicans went with it. So it fell to the Senate, where Democratic votes would be needed on the bill for it to pass.
Senate Democrats don’t face voters every two years. They have the luxury of overthinking themselves into oblivion, inventing scenarios to avoid confrontation that they can reverse engineer into seeming wise. That’s what Chuck Schumer did, retreating from the fight and advancing a bill he called abhorrent to avoid a government shutdown, as if we’re not experiencing that already.
Progressive Caucus chair Greg Casar (D-TX) may have summed it up best: “Today the biggest split among Democrats is between those who want to stand and fight and those who want to play dead.” There’s a Fearless Caucus and a Fear Caucus, a caucus who understands the risk of failure and wants to try to win anyway, and a caucus consumed by failure, straitjacketed by risk, who cowers and bows and shrinks from conflict.
That’s a split inside Washington. It’s not a close question in the rest of the country. There, the stand-and-fight faction is dominant, seen in the boiling anger at town hall meetings that caused Republicans to stop holding them. Gov. Tim Walz, who stood in for one of those Republicans at a swing district in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, yesterday, went viral for some red meat mocking an “unelected South African nepo baby.” But what he said right before that made the critical point: “There’s a responsibility in this time of chaos where elected officials need to hear what people are irritated about. And I would argue that Democratic officials should hear the primal scream that’s coming from America, [which] is, ‘Do something, dammit! This is wrong!’”
Walz was part of the losing ticket last November, and has the perspective of meeting people from across the country and gauging the national mood. His main takeaway was that the campaign was too cautious, too buttoned-down, too unwilling to take risks. That’s the correct lesson, because it has migrated from a tactical failing to a defining feature of the Democratic Party.
I certainly have views about what policies would bring about shared prosperity in America, and I believe that most of them would prove out as good politics. But I also agree that the Democrats’ major problem, before the election and certainly today, is that they are perceived as weak. Anything that perpetuates that image is poisonous for the party.
There is white-hot anger across the country right now, and responding to that with cowardice will end your political career. Maybe not today; a theoretical primary challenge for Schumer is three years away, when he would be 77. But his lack of leadership has been exposed. Democrats want a different party, one with a pulse, and eventually they will get it.
The politicians who understand this are not neatly grouped ideologically or generationally. Bernie Sanders, still out there giving speeches to thousands at age 83, is in the Fearless Caucus; on this issue, so was Nancy Pelosi. AOC has led the charge, but this was among the most eloquent statements I’ve seen this week:
Last night, House Democrats stood united against a bill that would let President Trump and Elon Musk shut down whatever part of the government they want, whenever they want. Now all eyes are on the Senate, the only institution in government where Democrats have true leverage thanks to the filibuster. Leader Schumer and Senate Democrats must use that leverage to fight for Americans facing higher costs, bigger deficits, and an intentional recession. They must use their leverage to bring Republicans to the negotiating table on President Trump’s unconstitutional funding cuts that violate the separation of powers.
Congress is a coequal branch of government, and we should take this opportunity to remind President Trump that he is not all-powerful. It’s time to stand up for our country and for Congress’s role as a check and balance on an overzealous president. If not now, when? If not us, then who?
That’s from Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA), former vice chair of the New Democrat Coalition and a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus.
Federal employees, who would be at risk of furlough or even termination in a shutdown, are in the Fearless Caucus. The lawyers and state attorneys general taking the Trump administration to court are in the Fearless Caucus. The ordinary people taking time out of their day to picket in front of a Tesla showroom or yell at their representative in Congress are in the Fearless Caucus. Even those who are pissed off by a weakening economy are in the Fearless Caucus, suggesting that the caucus is a majority of the country.
When there’s this big a disconnect between a party’s leadership and the voters, it cannot last.
