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The Schumer Scalp: A Waste Of Time, Money and Focus.
And Not (Mostly) For The Reasons You Might Think
Why You Might Want To Read This: Folks want Schumer’s “scalp” but there are the three reasons why time, energy, activism and money is better spent elsewhere.
Look, Chuck Schumer is a political car wreck. A disaster. Even among the small slice of voters who can even name him, or choose him out of a line-up or identify the Senate position he holds—and that’s a very, very small slice of voters—he inspires no one.
While Chuckie blathers on about “bi-partisanship” and always promises to find 1,000 ways to “find common ground” with lunatics, Republicans take Chuckie’s lunch money every day, with then-Republican leader and chief schoolyard bully Mitch McConnell building out the template years ago.
Worse, Schumer’s politics are bad on many levels, not the least of which is his decades-long leading role arming Israel to the teeth and, thus, blessing the slaughtering of thousands of men, women and children. Which if you aren’t appalled by the immorality of it all is just really bad politics with a huge swath of people, especially younger voters.
And he’s a coward, to boot. A guy who, by virtue of his leadership position, already has full-time security personnel and a retinue of factotums following him around at every moment, cancelled his recent book tour in the past week because of…“security reasons”.
C’mon, “security reasons” means he’s afraid of being shouted at by actual voters, which is a fantastic message to all those voters he, and his party sidekicks, claim to want to connect with out in the heartland (is my sarcasm heavy enough?). He should never be allowed, evah again, to utter some bullshit about his Brooklyn “toughness”. He’s a coddled, meek careerist.
I’m sympathetic that people want his “scalp” as a price for the almost daily caving in and lack of strategy and spine BUT….the hating on Schumer is a distraction, and an admission, implicit or explicit, that there is no coherent progressive opposition.
FIRST POINT: within a narrow political lens, what is the credible, fact-based, past track record path to replace Schumer?
Let’s start with the various calls for someone to primary him. In his last re-election campaign, 2022, Schumer raised more than $37 million facing virtually no opposition. The Democratic primary was cancelled for lack of an opponent, as was the primary for the third-party Working Families Party, which also, shaking in its boots, got in line and endorsed Schumer despite his pro-Wall Street record. He won the general election easily by 14 points.
That $37 million is the low-end of his money machine. If someone serious ran against him in a primary or general election in 2028, when he’s up next for re-election, he will easily pile up $80-$100 million, with AIPAC and Wall Street leading the charge on his behalf. And that will be in a presidential election year when, trust me, there will be a singular focus on a “get-with-the-program” message to ensure J.D. Vance is not the next president, which will scare away at least a certain segment of folks who are done with Schumer.
I’ve seen some comments from “progressive” groups claiming that small donor contributions will make a race credible because the “ground game” will make up for the financial gap, that there is something analogous to a “tea party” revolt gathering steam.
Please, excuse me while I spit out my tea in laughter. New York is not Vermont, Vermont being probably the only state where someone like Bernie Sanders has a prayer of being elected statewide (since it has exactly one member of Congress who covers the entire state like a U.S. Senator, allowing Bernie to first serve in the House and build name recognition over 16 years before running for the Senate). It took only a fraction of a Schumer-like money dump to defeat, in primaries, progressive “Squad” members Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, who were House incumbents. The “progressive” movement is, to date, disorganized, incoherent and lacking a serious bench of capable organizers.
Your second, more immediate, route is to encourage some internal coup. That’s going to fail as well—his caucus members know he controls both committee assignments and the spigot to the outside big money donors. You think anyone is likely to be a coup leader? Certainly not Dick Durbin, who is way past his expiration date and conveys the energy of an undertaker, or Jack Reed, an unintelligible mumbler, or Patty Murray who has gone from the 1992 victorious “mom in tennis shoes” to a dour dinosaur or the roughly half-dozen others who wake up each morning and hear “Hail to The Chief” in their heads as they plot their path to the White House and, so, have zero interest in alienating the party elites.
As the cliche goes, if you come for the king, you better not miss.
SECOND POINT: Let’s say, by some miracle, Schumer is kicked to the curb. What then?
The reality is harsh: The U.S. Senate is pretty much a black hole for progress, and will be functionally dead for at least a decade or two. By that, I mean there is very little chance that some hoped-for progressive majority takes power, ushering in a second New Deal. It’s not a zero chance but, given the choice, I’d place my very small available money on the almost certainly suicidal bet that the White Sox win the World Series this year (sorry, Chisox fans!).
That bracing reality has a lot to do with the undemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate, which should be abolished. (Read the chapter on the Senate in Robert Dahl’s “How Democratic Is the U.S. Constitution”?, a book in which he also argues the Supreme Court is undemocratic, a view held by many others even before this cast of jokers, liars and sexual predators became the Court’s majority).
To repeat what my smart readers know: the current Senate Majority leader, John Thune, comes from South Dakota, a state with 924,000 people. He has the same voting power in the Senate as either California senator, a state with almost 40 million people and a $4 trillion economy that makes it the largest sub-national economy on the planet. Madness! And patently anti-democratic.
If you consider the Senate election cycles coming up over the next decade, Republicans have a solid lock on 40 seats—that count does not include Maine, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio or even Iowa. I *suppose* in some of those cases (Maine, North Carolina, Ohio) someone could make a semi-credible case for winning a currently-held Republican seat (for example, when Grassley finally, officially, is declared brain dead or dies in office—senility, as we know, is not disqualifying to continue to serve—some non-Republican *might* win the Iowa seat). Note: the 40-seat lock means you will never get 3/4 of the state legislatures to vote for a constitutional amendment abolishing the Senate. We are stuck with it.
If by some miracle, Democrats win back the Senate in any of the next 2-3 elections, what would the unnamed Schumer replacement face? Let’s pretend this new Senator doesn’t first have to battle inside the party on some core economic and foreign policy planks (alert: s/he WILL have that very fight and, yes, I am not taking seriously, absent evidence, that a third-party, independent majority will descend from the heavens). There’s that thing called the filibuster, the 60-vote super majority required to move most bills, which ensures that any decent idea—national health care, e.g.—goes to its legislative limbo to die. For example, there are not, and will never be, 60 votes to pass the Protecting the Right To Organize (PRO) Act (and, as I’ve written elsewhere, it’s time for the labor movement to stop wasting time giving the impression otherwise).
Virtually nothing will pass. If your jam is to just be part of halting the worst of the worst, by all means, be a U.S. Senator.
THIRD POINT: Expecting Schumer to be the opposition is a “tell” on the lack of coherent strategy from progressives. The bigger obstacle: re-imagining the political system and building ***effective*** organizing, rather than the mess we have now, and, in the short term, focus energy, money, heart and soul into local elections. I’m going to opine on this third point some more soon but, for today, just three short-version tasks to focus on rather than Schumer...
Task number one: figuring out what the hell “progressive” means. I recently observed that anyone can embrace the “progressive” mantle—the “progressive” label became a thing back in the 1980s so actual socialists/communists/left-wingers could call themselves something approaching “the left” and avoid being red-baited, especially in the labor movement.
In recent years, you could vote for the Iraq War, get paid $225,000-per-vacuous-contentless-speech to Goldman Sachs and be for the death penalty and, without irony, call yourself a “progressive”—as Hillary Clinton has done. You can run for City Council as a “progressive” in my city and, at the same time, get on your hands and knees begging for the support of the business lobby which is shredding the livelihoods of working people—as plenty of posers did.
Voters are not dumb—they understand what utter rank hypocrisy these phonies represent.
Task number two: for the moment, if we use “progressive” in a somewhat amorphous way, the progressive “movement” is a cacophony of thousands and thousands of organizations. Mostly, deeply ineffective.
Each organization thinks it has The Answer. The organizations that survive, even if they barely hobble along and can’t point to any substantive victory, have a singular skill: each has figured out how to unlock the money spigot from foundations or individual donors. These thousands of organizations are competing for a finite amount of money from foundations and rich donors.
There needs to be a serious consolidation of organizations, at the local and national level.
That will help with the financing of the building of a deep bench of capable, experienced political organizers.
Task number three: local politics is winnable, especially if you consider that it costs a lot less than a big-state U.S. Senate race. It can turn into wielding enormous power, especially in states that allows people-sponsored ballot initiatives.
It doesn’t entirely meet the understandable urgency to halt today an expanding kleptocracy. However, it’s worth picking, carefully, some local (meaning, not federal) races to compete in that are affordable, winnable and move the ball.
It’s the beginning steps for seizing power and reshaping politics.
The electoral path is not enough. There has never been a better moment for a general strike. Actually, it’s long overdue and very doable.
Stay tuned for the general strike musings.
