Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer quickly apologized and walked back an insult against the GOP during an interview with MSNBC defending his decision to vote with Republicans to fund the government past Saturday.
Asked by Chris Hayes about his strategy for opposing Republicans’ “assault on the constitutional order,” Schumer argued that keeping the government open would allow Democrats to focus on their core message: that President Donald Trump and his allies’ attacks on the government are aimed at making the middle class pay for billionaire tax cuts.
“It’s much, much better not to be in the middle of a shutdown, which would divert people from the No. 1 issue we have against these b-----ds,” he said before stopping and adding, “Sorry. These people.”
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His comments came Thursday night after an abrupt U-turn on whether Senate Democrats would support a continuing resolution bill that gives the president the power to cancel individual budget items—a power typically reserved for Congress.
Republicans had backed Democrats into a corner because a shutdown would have allowed Trump and his billionaire megadonor Elon Musk to put Musk’s nebulous cost-cutting task force DOGE into overdrive. But Hayes voiced many Democrats’ concerns that bailing out Republicans and keeping the government open would only invite more steamrolling.
“The only thing that gets them to back down is meeting conflict with conflict,” he said of the Republicans. “If you meet conflict with managed retreat or strategic retreat, or strategic non-engagement, then they roll all over you.”
Schumer said Democrats had plans “to conflict” with Republicans on “everything,” including tax cuts for billionaires and potential cuts to Medicaid, though he didn’t say how that would work now that Democrats are giving up one of their rare areas of leverage.
“They’ve become a plutocracy, an oligarchy,” he said. “One other thing about a shutdown: the courts could close, or at least be totally, totally disabled, and the courts are one of the best ways we’ve had to go after these guys,” Schumer told Hayes.
