“Chuck Schumer committed the grave sin of accepting reality,” said Brendan Buck in The New York Times. “And his party is now furious.” The Senate minority leader is facing his Democratic colleagues’ ire after he and nine establishment colleagues voted yes to pass the House Republicans’ six-month stopgap funding bill, which prevented an imminent government shutdown.
Many House and Senate Democrats, who want to try to block President Trump’s agenda at any cost, are questioning his leadership. In the House, the progressive champion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Schumer’s decision “a huge slap in the face” and a “betrayal,” and there is talk she’ll mount a future primary challenge to Schumer in New York.
The progressive wing is “spoiling for a fight to solve its morale problem,” said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch, but as Schumer recognized, a government shutdown would have been “a gift to Trump.” The spectacle would have diverted the public’s attention from the severe damage his tariff war is doing to the economy. And a shutdown would have given “Elon Musk and his flying monkeys” a pretext “to DOGE-ify the entire federal bureaucracy,” laying off hundreds of thousands of workers who’d never get their jobs back.
“Schumer had only bad political options,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. But that’s the Democrats’ fault. With Republicans controlling both the House and Senate, Democrats have little leverage other than a Senate filibuster. “That’s the price of voter backlash against four years of progressive governance.”
The party’s frustrated left-wing activists are demanding “theater, not strategy,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. Indeed, polling shows 80 percent of Democrats want their leaders to be more combative toward Trump. But “the current cast of Democrats cannot give their base what it wants.”
“An already demoralized Democratic base” is now wondering where to go from here, said Hayes Brown in MSNBC. The party’s favorability rating has cratered to just 29 percent—its lowest in more than 30 years—as voters lose faith that Democratic leaders can present a viable alternative to Trump, or stand up to an aspiring autocrat as he tramples the Constitution. “In refusing to use every tool in his power to stop Trump,” Schumer has left Democrats wondering if their leaders’ “warnings about the threat Trump poses to the country will be reflected in their actions.”