Schumer Didn't Know the Can of Whoop-Ass He Was Opening [View all]

[BeyondGeography]

Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo

I don’t want to say I told you so. Because lots of people were saying similar things. But I think I was right when I said that Chuck Schumer didn’t grasp the magnitude or the intensity of the fissure he was opening up in the Democratic Party with his handling of the Musk/Trump continuing resolution. (I said he was like one of those Chernobyl victims who’s already been fatally irradiated but seems fine. Radiation poisoning takes a few days to get you.) They thought it was just the online resistance types acting up and wanting a fight. They didn’t understand the depth of it. I’m pretty certain Schumer didn’t think he’d still be making the rounds of the morning shows going on two weeks later trying to hold on to his job.

In my mind, the real failure wasn’t even so much the one people watched play out a week ago. The real failure was in the preceding six weeks. I still think they should have refused the continuing resolution for all the reasons we discussed at the time. But by that time the Democrats really were in a jam. By laying no groundwork for the coming confrontation, they’d made it a much harder choice. In the internal hand-wringing I picked up in the 24 hours before Schumer’s cave, people were saying, “Yeah, we should be fighting. But it’s basically too late.”

… This is a perfect example of clever tactics devoid of a larger strategy. Yes, draw back a bit when your political foes are getting hammered. In general. But that’s tactics — fiddling over timing to let your foes take some bruises, fine tuning and adjustment on the margins. The White House strategy here is to move so fast that by the time the courts and or public opinion catches up with them the deeds are done and cannot be undone. That’s a very plausible strategy and they’re continuing to execute it. If Democrats were going to fight and risk a shutdown they needed to be explaining well in advance why they were doing it. They needed to be explaining that it was the White House that was forcing the matter, that for anyone upset or worried about DOGE, it was the Democrats who were saying no. Each scary thing or outrage that comes down the pike Democrats say: “We don’t accept this. We’re putting the White House on notice: stop this now and, if you don’t, we’re not going to give you the votes you need in March. Someone has to speak up for the people you’re hurting and the people you’re stealing from. Someone has to channel people’s feelings of powerlessness.”

When you’re reacting, you’re usually losing and at best you’re treading water. It’s different occasionally but not often. A couple days ago I was talking to one TPM Reader who was very upset about Schumer and asked if I thought Schumer would be ready to draw some new red lines and stick to them. I told him I thought red lines were irrelevant. We’re way downstream of every red line I can think of. A red line is just marking some new set of actions that if Trump does them Democrats are going to do something in return. As I told this reader, the way I see this, the White House has us on our own 30 yard line. Structurally, the Democrats are on defense, both in my analogy and in reality. There’s no point denying that. Republicans have the executive power. Republicans control the Congress. But in football you can go on offense on the defensive plays. I don’t want to wait until they’re in the red zone, let alone the end zone. I want to take some risks to get some sacks now. I want to get aggressive and force some turnovers. Quite simply, I don’t want to react.

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