Chuck Schumer

The calls started almost immediately. The bodies of nineteen children and two teachers had barely cooled when politicians and activists took to social media demanding some sort of action on guns. Some called the National Rifle Association a terrorist organization, while others castigated Republicans for allegedly supporting gun rights over children. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was urged to bring a bill on background checks up for a vote so the “votes fall with the children who died.” Politics takes no break during tragedies. The crescendo of activist furor will likely peak this weekend during the NRA Convention in Houston. Demonstrations are already planned near the George R. Brown Convention Center with political actors of all kinds expected to attend.

Yesterday, in the US Senate, Democrats let their abortion extremism hang out. No more faking it about "safe, legal, and rare": the new standard is "I mean, do you feel like it?" After the leak of Justice Alito's draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, it was inevitable that Chuck Schumer would introduce some kind of abortion legislation. Even if his bill couldn't hurdle over a filibuster, the Democrats could as least use it as a planted flag in the culture war to come. Their base has spent the last week running into traffic yodeling about right-wing fascism. And given that a majority of Americans support some kind of legal abortion, surely there was room to maneuver here. Instead, Schumer decided to tap into his party's dark id.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer knows how to fix inflation: higher taxes. “If you want to get rid of inflation, the only way to do it is to undo a lot of the Trump tax cuts and raise rates,” surmised the New York Democrat to reporters on Tuesday, after meeting with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin about the budget. “No Republican is ever going to do that. So the only way to get rid of inflation is through reconciliation.” Manchin saw it slightly differently, portraying tax increases as budget reduction tools. He believes debt reduction is “the only way” to fight an inflation problem that threatens to wash away Democratic majorities in Congress.

Many of our political leaders are historically illiterate. This is especially concerning given that some of these politicians have been around since the dawn of time. They've lived through much of the history they now seem to know so little about. While heaping praise on Biden’s decision to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer decided to spread misinformation. Luckily his misinformation was just a rant on the Senate floor and not on Spotify. Otherwise, Neil Young might have had some words for him. "Until 1981, this powerful body, the Supreme Court, was all white men. Imagine. America wasn't all white men in 1981, or ever.

How long will the Democrats weep for the death of their transformational agenda this week? It's anyone’s guess. Everyone handles grief differently. Senator Chuck Schumer’s decision to hold a vote on a filibuster carveout seems like less of a Hail Mary effort and more like an attempt to virtue-signal toward the progressives in his party. If someday he is forced to go toe-to-toe in a Senate primary with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at least he can tell the pitch-fork waving socialists that he tried to change the filibuster. That should save him, right Chuck? Despite President Biden’s opinion, that he “probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen”, the general consensus after his first year is that things aren’t going great.

Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of Donald Trump? I am wondering when we are going to have Congressional Committees grilling people about such matters. I suppose they could, in homage to a certain senator from Wisconsin, be called the House and Senate American Activities Committee. Nancy and Chuck should preside. They could share some of that expensive chocolate ice cream that the always well-coifed Nancy likes as they root out people who say things they don’t like and vote for people with whom they disagree. I’m sure they would get a lot of academic support. Just a week or so back, one professor suggested that criticizing St Anthony Fauci or other government officials should be a federal hate crime. Why not?

‘Oh the hypocrisy!’ cried the Democrats after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would bring President Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee to the floor for confirmation hearings and a vote ahead of the election. The screeching continued as swing vote after swing vote — Sens. Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley and Mitt Romney, for example — said they also supported taking a vote. Republicans are indeed treating the vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who passed away on Friday night, far differently than they did the one left by Antonin Scalia in 2016. The GOP had control of the Senate then, too, but refused to advance President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, citing the proximity of the presidential election.

When 83-year-old New Jersey congressman Bill Pascrell shared a photo of American lawmakers meeting a Chinese trade delegation in Washington in 2018, he probably didn’t expect it to go viral on Weibo. (You wonder, rather cruelly, if the congressman is familiar with the term ‘viral’ at all.) But it did go viral — gleefully and potently viral — on Chinese social media. Why? The picture showed two delegations at a table. The Chinese look young, or at least they do when sat opposite the Americans. They look grizzled in the original sense of the word: like gray-haired old men. This image was cannily juxtaposed on Weibo with another one, taken in 1901 in Beijing, at the close of the Boxer Rebellion.

American politics is getting senile. Donald Trump and Barack Obama were both elected as agents of change, repudiations of an ancien régime represented by the Bush and Clinton dynasties. But after eight years of Obama, Hillary Clinton inherited the Democratic party anyway. Frustrated with just how little had changed, voters clutched for a more radical alternative in 2016 — and they found it in Trump. Now, if polls and betting markets are to be believed, the country is on the verge of turning its back on Trump. But if he does lose in November, his defeat does not promise to be a source of renewal — not when the alternative is a 77-year-old former vice president.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is attempting to hold up $50 billion in farm aid during negotiations over a coronavirus stimulus bill, a GOP aide tells The Spectator. Schumer is 'holding hostage' aid given to farmers through the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), a USDA-owned entity, according to the aide. The farm aid is just the latest piece of the stimulus package to which Democrats have raised objections. A potential deal to move forward on a bill failed Sunday after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Schumer said they disagreed with the GOP's approach to bailouts for big businesses. Both claimed the bailouts did not include enough protection for workers.

The Senate is not going to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and to all appearances the whole thing is nearly over. Acquittal is imminent, and supposedly serious commentators are on Twitter wailing in unison with Democratic activists. But what they are saying does not make any sense — it’s contradictory. On the one hand, they say that the case against Donald Trump is open-and-shut: so utterly persuasive in objective terms that only the Senate Republicans’ bad faith has prevented them from admitting it.

After his soporific performance last night on national television, Donald Trump is back in form. He just engineered a fresh shutdown this afternoon. At a meeting with congressional Democrats this afternoon, Trump threw a temper tantrum, slamming his fist on the Resolute Desk and exiting the Oval Office. He tweeted, ‘Just left a meeting with Chuck and Nancy, a total waste of time. I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up, are you going to approve Border Security which includes a Wall or Steel Barrier? Nancy said, NO. I said bye-bye, nothing else works!’By the bye, Trump is insisting that Republicans have never been more unified.

Sometime back in the Pleistocene Era — that is to say, round about 2015 — a frequent criticism of Donald Trump was that he wasn’t ‘really’ a conservative. He was an ‘opportunist,’ you see, someone who blithely changed his position on exigent issues — abortion, government run health care, etc. — and even his political party to suit the prevailing winds of the zeitgeist. There is something to that charge, but the more interesting question is whether it counts as a criticism or a commendation. The poet William Blake was not exactly a political sage. But his observation that an honest man may change his opinions but not his principles is relevant here.

Chuck and Nancy dismantled Donald Trump at the White House today. Trump declared, ‘If we don’t get what we want, one way or the other, whether it’s through you, through military, through anything you want to call, I will shut down the government. I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down.’ Poll after poll has shown that government shutdowns backfire with the public. Trump should have shut up about a shutdown. But Trump, baited by Schumer, couldn’t resist posturing as Mr Big, the protector of the frontier who will singlehandedly stop drugs and felons from entering the US on the southern border, if he can only secure $5 billion to build a wall. The meeting served as an augury of what likely awaits Trump over the next two years.

We’re all Trumpologists now. Like the Kremlinologists of the Cold War, monitoring the line-ups at missile parades to see who was in or out of the Politburo, we track the president’s Twitter twitches and off-the-cuff quips, then guess which way he’s going to go next. The Soviets were rational actors, and so was Donald Trump when he responded to the midterms. He called the split Congress a ‘beautiful, bipartisan-type situation’ — beautiful because the situation places Trump at the fulcrum of power, bi-partisan because no legislature will pass without both sides on board. Trump is the president who spent his first few days in the White House annulling Barack Obama’s executive orders.