Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) rejected comparisons between himself and former President Joe Biden, saying he wouldn’t step down.
In a Sunday appearance on NBC News’s Meet the Press, Schumer, 74, spoke about his gripes with President Donald Trump and responded to criticism regarding why he allowed the Republican-authored continuing resolution to pass. The move has been derided by many Democrats as helping Trump and the Republican Party, leading some on the Left to suggest that his time to step down has come. Schumer made clear that he has no plans to do so.
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“Look, I’m not stepping down,” he responded when asked if he would heed the calls of some Senate Democrats to do so. “The CR was certainly bad, you know, the continuing resolution, but a shutdown would be 15 or 20 times worse. Under a shutdown, the executive branch has sole power to determine what is, ‘essential,’ and they can determine without any court supervision.”
“They would eviscerate the federal government,” Schumer added, claiming that Trump could cut off all public transit, stop “feeding hungry children,” cut Medicaid and Social Security, and “go after the veterans.”
He then claimed a Senate Republican had told a member of his caucus that the “DOGE Musk people” would have kept the government shut down for up to a year, “till everyone was furloughed and gone and quit and there’d be no way to stop it.”
“There’s no off-ramp. Who determines how long the shutdown would last, only those evil people at the top of the executive branch in the Trump administration,” Schumer said.
Host Kristen Welker brought up the comparison of Biden, saying some Democrats had drawn parallels between their situations. She asked if Schumer felt he was making the same mistake Biden did.
“No, absolutely not. I did this out of conviction. And look, in my caucus, we have a disagreement as to, you know, some people voted one way, some people voted the other, but we’ve all agreed to respect each other because each side saw why the other side felt so strongly about it, and our caucus is united in fighting Donald Trump every step of the way,” Schumer answered.
“Our goal, our plan, which we’re united on, is to make Donald Trump the quickest lame duck in modern history by showing how bad his policies are,” he added.
When he was presented with a clip of himself promising to “fight” and asked if he believed his actions were meeting the urgency of the situation, Schumer dismissed the remarks as “one day and one line.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Schumer said the United States was experiencing a constitutional crisis and that democracy itself was at risk.
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“Donald Trump is a lawless, angry man. He thinks he should be king. He thinks he should do whatever he wants, regardless of the law, and he thinks judges should just listen to him. Now we have to fight that back in every single way, and we actually have had over 100 cases in the courts where we’ve had a very good record of success,” he said.
Calls for older congressional leaders to step down have taken center stage after several public health concerns last year about Biden, former Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and others. McConnell, Biden, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) all heeded those calls, making Schumer the oldest Democrat with a leadership position.
