Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) delivered a back-handed insult to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) over his eleventh-hour conversion on the Republican-led Continuing Resolution that passed on Friday, ensuring that the federal government would be funded through September.
Pelosi — who voted with nearly all of the Democrats in the lower chamber (save Maine’s Rep. Jared Golden) against the stopgap measure — suggested that Schumer had essentially given away his vote, giving President Donald Trump and the Republicans a win without getting anything in return for his own party.
“I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” Pelosi said at a Tuesday press conference in her hometown of San Francisco. “And I think that’s what happened the other day.”
Pelosi had lauded her successor in House leadership, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and called on her party to reject the CR: “I salute Leader Hakeem Jeffries for his courageous rejection of this false choice, and I am proud of my colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus for their overwhelming vote against this bill.”
She went on to suggest that any shutdown would be blamed on President Trump in spite of the fact that Democrats — in the Senate in particular — were the only ones with the power to either push the bill across the finish line or stop it in its tracks. “America has experienced a Trump shutdown before – but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse. Democrats must not buy into this false choice. We must fight back for a better way,” she said.
Schumer argued that a shutdown, given the optics, would be far more damaging to the Democratic Party as a whole than the passage of the CR — but his party, thus far, does not appear to be buying his argument.
The Senate leader was even on his heels on ABC’s “The View” — which would typically be a relatively friendly audience for Democrats — as several of the hosts questioned not just his vote but also his leadership moving forward.
Even Jeffries, who typically would not cross Schumer in public, refused to answer when asked whether he felt the longtime senator was still the right person to lead the Senate.
One unnamed House Democrat, according to an Axios report published on Tuesday, said that Schumer’s popularity within the party was “hovering somewhere between Elon Musk and the Ebola virus.”
