Still doing damage control after his heavily criticized decision to throw support to the GOP budget last week over the objections of the majority of his party, Chuck Schumer returned to “All In With Chris Hayes” Tuesday night to yet again try to explain himself.
But Schumer, who is now facing calls to step down as Senate Minority Leader, might have made things worse for himself, as Hayes at one point became so frustrated with the New York Democrat’s rhetoric that he let out an uncharacteristically emotive response: “My god.”
You can watch the interview below:
Schumer previously appeared on the show last week, after announcing his opposition to blocking the bill, because doing so could have forced a government shut down. That conversation was somewhat brief compared to Tuesday’s more wide-ranging interview.
Schumer justiftified his heavily criticized opposition strategy by explaining Democratic leaders haven’t yet encountered the right “moments” to use their leverage, while simultaneously insisting he is “fighting relentlessly.” He also fell back again and again on talking points he’s used in other recent interviews, and suggested more than once that he views current events as functionally identical to previous political eras. And Schumer insisted that despite a range of issues Hayes brought up during the interview, democracy in America isn’t threatened “yet.”
That conversational direction is what really started to get to Hayes who, though maintaining his professional demeanor also clearly displayed a look of disbelief.
At one point, Hayes asked, “what is the strategic plan?
Schumer responded in part by listing several economic issues he said “unites the Democratic Party,” followed by talking points he’s deployed elsewhere. Then, he continued, “we have started doing this day in, day out, every day, fighting relentlessly. His numbers have started to go down from 51 to 47, if we keep at it and keep at it and keep at it, his numbers will be much lower. He will not only be less popular, but less effective. Second, we will find the moments where we shouldn’t give them votes, where Hakeem [Jeffries, House Democratic Leader] and I met yesterday. We’re exploring that right now, and there will be times just like this instance, where people will say, ‘don’t give them the votes, because you have the leverage. It will be, there will be instances not like this, where a shutdown would ensue, but we will have the higher ground and we’re going to do it. Watch us.”
“All of those things you enumerated, which all sound like good politics to me, yeah, are the kinds of things that you’d be doing if Mitt Romney were president,” Hayes responded. “Like there’s this weird asymmetry right now, which is that they are acting in this totally new way, yes, in which they are ambitiously trying to seize all power and create a presidential dictatorship in the United States of America, and the Democratic opposition is acting like, ‘well, if we can get the report rate down a few points.’ Then what happens?”
“What happens is, look, first we get it way down, he’s going to have much less. We, this worked in 2017. You say that ‘now it’s a different government,’” Schumer replied.
“It’s different though,” Hayes interjected. “My God.”
As for when Schumer would consider the situation dire in the same terms Hayes does, that came a bit later when Hayes and Schumer discussed the various court cases against Trump, and Trump’s defiance of them.
“In a genuine, sort of good faith way, that there’s a lot of people, and I think I probably count myself, who think that that’s where we are right now,” Hayes said.
“Now, you may be right. I don’t think so… We’re not there. You know, I think we’re getting there. We have to be really vigilant. I just had a meet up today with the Judiciary Committee to decide how we’re working through this. As it goes further, it hasn’t been up to the Supreme Court yet, which would be the classic, ‘if they disobey the Supreme Court,’ we’re on our way there<” Schumer said. “God, God forbid. But I think we are, and we’ll have to go at it and at it and at it.”
“And that is different than anything else. Different than anything else. It’s Quantum Leap different, because our democracy is then 248 years of American democracy, the Magna Carta is out the window, and we will all have to take extraordinary action,” Schumer added.
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