Takeaways ​From ​The Times Interview ​With Chuck Schumer About the Federal Spending Bill

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The day after angering many Democrats’ by backing a Republican spending bill, Schumer argued that he can still lead his party in the Senate, even amid furious backlash.

By Lulu Garcia-Navarro

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is facing the biggest revolt from Democrats in years, but in a conversation with The Interview after his crucial vote supporting a Republican federal spending bill this past week, he tried to brush off questions about whether he should step aside. Democratic officials appeared stunned when Schumer did an about-face on the spending bill, arguing that the choice was the lesser of two evils. Schumer defended his decision in the second part of our wide-ranging interview, even as questions over his leadership by senior party officials continued.

Here are three takeaways from the shutdown portion of our conversation.

Schumer said that he made a “very, very difficult” decision to support the Republican bill in order to avert a government shutdown that, he said, President Trump and Elon Musk wanted. He called Trump and Musk “anti-government fanatics” and “nihilists.”

They want to shutter “agency after agency,” he said, which would create a situation far worse than the Republican bill. He continued:

Two days from now in a shutdown, they could say, well, food stamps for kids is not essential. It’s gone. All veterans offices in rural areas are gone. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. They’re not essential. We’re cutting them back. So it’d be horrible. The damage they can do under a shutdown is much worse than any other damage that they could do.

Isn’t this just — Wait, let me just finish, Lulu. It can last forever. There is no off ramp. One of the Republican senators told us: We go to a shutdown, it’s going to be there for six months, nine months, a year. And by then, their goal of destroying the federal government would be gone. And finally, one final point here, and that is that right now under the C.R., you can go to court and contest an executive order to shut something down. Under a shutdown, the executive branch has sole power.

While he accepted that there were “divisions” within his party around his vote, he insisted that he and his fellow Democrats have a respect for each other and that they are united in their fight against Trump.

Schumer reluctantly acknowledged that he and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who talk often, have not spoken since Schumer’s surprising vote, suggesting that there is a rupture between the two most senior Democrats in Congress.

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