Chuck Schumer’s Final Call

Chuck Schumer did not expect to become the Senate Majority Leader after the 2020 election. The Democrats held forty-eight seats, with two upcoming races in Georgia that he didn’t think the Party would win. Without a Senate majority, he told Joe Biden in the months before the Inauguration, “you’re not going to have a happy time as President.” On the night of January 5, 2021, Schumer watched the Georgia returns in the book-lined living room of his Brooklyn apartment. “Finally, at four in the morning, it becomes clear we won both seats in Georgia,” he told me. “I felt amazing. I can’t sleep, get in the car at 7:30 A.M., drive down to D.C.”

Later that afternoon, as the incoming Majority Leader, he was counting electoral votes on the Senate floor when a policeman rushed over. “He grabs me by the collar. I’ll never forget that, and he says, ‘Senator, we’re in danger, we got to get out of here.’ ” Trump supporters, most of whom had just attended the outgoing President’s speech on the Ellipse, had stormed the Capitol. Schumer exited the chamber and rushed down the hallway. “I was within twenty feet of these bastards,” he told me. “January 5th and January 6th: I call them the best of times, the worst of times.”

Since then, Schumer has presided over an evenly divided Senate, just the fourth such split in U.S. history. “This is the hardest job I’ve ever had,” he told me. A month after the Capitol riot, as Democrats were trying to confirm Biden’s Cabinet secretaries, the Senate held an impeachment trial for Donald Trump. Schumer had wanted it to start in January, as soon as the House sent over the articles, but the outgoing Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, stalled. In the end, all but seven of the Republicans in the chamber voted to acquit Trump, including McConnell, who, according to an account in “This Will Not Pass,” by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, had told his aides, “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us.”

Then the Democrats had to legislate, with zero margin for error. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema became the faces of a party that always seemed just a few votes shy of delivering on its biggest campaign promises. Nevertheless, Congress passed two major pieces of legislation in its first year in session. One was the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9-trillion relief measure that infused money into local and state governments, financed vaccination programs, aided businesses, and fought child poverty. The other was the $1.2-trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which funded roads and bridges, public transit, improvements to the electrical grid, broadband Internet, and clean-energy initiatives. “The American Rescue Plan, in and of itself, was the most impactful thing a member could do in thirty years,” a senior Senate aide told me. The infrastructure bill, he said, “was the largest infrastructure bill in forty to fifty years.” The successes registered, but only briefly. “We didn’t let each victory breathe,” the aide said. “We went immediately into Build Back Better,” which was the President’s sweeping domestic-policy plan.

That became the crucible for a bitter fight within the Party. In its original form, the Build Back Better Act promised some $3.5 trillion to tackle climate change and invest in an ambitious range of social services, from universal pre-K to child tax credits and paid family leave. Administration officials knew it would have to be pared down. But, in multiple rounds of negotiations, spanning more than a year, Manchin played the role of principled holdout, then spoiler. By the summer of 2022, when the effort to salvage the President’s agenda appeared doomed, Schumer started to achieve a series of legislative breakthroughs on other issues. Between June and August, Congress passed a bipartisan gun-control bill, a major extension of health-care benefits for veterans, and the CHIPS Act, which provides more than fifty billion dollars in subsidies to spur domestic semiconductor production. On August 4th, Michael Bennet, of Colorado, told me, “This might be the most productive ten days that I’ve seen in thirteen years being here.”

Three days later, after an all-night session, the Senate passed an unprecedented reconciliation bill, with the Vice-President casting the tie-breaking vote. The Inflation Reduction Act, as it was called, cut the cost of prescription drugs, expanded health-care subsidies, raised taxes on large corporations, and financed an unprecedented set of tax incentives for green energy. “Did Democrats Just Save Civilization?” Paul Krugman asked in the Times, adding, “This is a very big deal.” Schumer told me, “The whole mood turned around in that second week in August. You felt it everywhere.” Still, even some of the bill’s strongest supporters didn’t expect it to swing the upcoming midterms in their favor. In the hours before the chamber passed the reconciliation bill, Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, told me, “I’m a believer that this election is going to be much more about choice and personal freedom and Republican radicalism than it is going to be about the reconciliation bill, which is weird because this is the most popular, most comprehensive piece of legislation we passed in a long time.”

Now, a week before the midterms, which tend to punish the President’s party in any year, high inflation and fears of a recession have darkened the picture for Democrats. The Party is almost certain to lose the House majority. The Senate may still be within reach—owing, in part, to a slate of weak Republican candidates. The Times recently reported that many Democratic candidates were not mentioning the Party’s $1.9-trillion economic rescue plan because it “has become fodder for Republicans to attack Democrats over rapidly rising prices, accusing them of overstimulating the economy.” In a number of critical races, candidates have largely avoided touting the Party’s other legislative successes, instead boiling down their components into a series of “kitchen-table” issues, such as the cost of prescription drugs and energy prices. “What we have going for us is what we’ve accomplished, and I think what our views are is much closer to what people believe,” Schumer told me. “What’s going against us is the natural, you know—the sourness in the land.”

When I met Schumer last week, at his apartment in Brooklyn, he was sitting in his socks in his living room, home for a short spell between campaign stops. “Lots of legislation was cooked up right here,” he told me, nodding at our surroundings. He referred to the room as his “little command center.” On one wall was a framed poster from an old F.D.R. campaign. On another, beside a doorway leading into the kitchen, was a poster from the 1928 Presidential campaign of Alfred E. Smith, the New York governor, with the slogan “Honest, Able, Fearless.”

Earlier that afternoon, Schumer had been on the phone with two senators in tight races: Mark Kelly, who is holding onto a narrow lead in Arizona, and Catherine Cortez Masto, who is running about even with her opponent, Adam Laxalt, in Nevada. The Democrats’ hopes to retain control of the Senate hinge on these races, and also two others. In Georgia, Raphael Warnock has struggled to fend off Herschel Walker, whose campaign has been dogged by a series of significant scandals. In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor, had been leading Mehmet Oz, the television doctor turned Republican challenger, for much of the race. But Fetterman’s weak performance in a recent debate—the result of a stroke he suffered in the spring—has made him vulnerable. If Democrats lose in just two of these states, and the results everywhere else conform to the expectations of the polls, Republicans will retake the majority in the Senate.

Chuck Schumer’s Final Call
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