Step Aside, Schumer. The Nation Can’t Survive With You In Charge.

Politics

from the open-letter dept

Dear Senator Schumer:

There is no question that you are a dedicated public servant. You believe in our democracy. You believe in the norms that maintain it. You believe in its mission of bringing us together to promote the general welfare. There are many, many favorable things that can be said about you, your service, and your leadership up to now.

But you are not up for this fight for our nation’s future. And we need in leadership someone who is ready for it, right now, if any of those things that you value are going to survive.

That person is not you. You do not even seem to recognize that the fight for our country’s survival is already upon us. While people take hit after hit, to their livelihoods, physical well-being, freedoms and futures, and already countless have rolled up their sleeves to try to stem the onslaught, you continue as though everything is business as usual and there is not already an existential threat to our country that has landed at our door. “We will fight, and we will win!” you say, as if the moment to begin that fight has yet to come. You keep conjugating the Constitutional crisis in the future tense, apparently oblivious to the fact that it has been unfolding, at greater and greater cost, every day for the past two months, from the moment Trump took office—if not also long before.

And all you have done is greased the skids for it, as you have allowed a lawless tyrant the privilege of normal order that he has otherwise been upending with his every other move. You have allowed him, with only the most minimal resistance, to lawfully embed the corrupt and incompetent into the highest official roles in government, while also effectively allowing his most dangerous henchman to evade Senate supervision entirely as he attacks, without lawful authority or restraint, the country’s infrastructure and resources, as well as Congress’s own legislative and fiduciary roles.

Yet it is not clear that you have even noticed. Because while you acknowledge the role of the courts in trying to, belatedly, clean up the mess, at no point do you seem to understand your own. You have done almost nothing to resist, nothing to fight back, nothing to say no to all of these Trump-driven assaults on our Constitutional order. Your silence instead keeps saying yes.

Worse, you keep undermining anyone else’s ability to stand against it. No matter how right you thought you were on the continuing resolution, to undercut your party as unilaterally as you did is inexcusable. Even if you were right on the merits of the risked shutdown—and at best it was dubious, both legally and in terms of calculating the political cost to the GOP if it were pursued—you could not have been right enough to justify such destructive hubris to blow up the unity and momentum that at last had finally started to coalesce and surrender, for nothing, the power it possessed.

It’s a hubris that also expects voters to be fools. “We will win in 2026,” you predict, while daily negating any reason voters should reward you or your party with such victory and leaving the democratic institutions that would enable such an election to further erode. By refusing to flex your power in any even slightly meaningful way you teach the electorate that there is no point in voting for Democrats, no point giving them any more power, when you so adamantly refuse to use what power you already have. Yet you seem to hope voters somehow won’t notice, that they won’t notice how unqualified you are as stewards of the rule of law, when you cannot even recognize that it has been attacked when laws themselves aren’t obeyed and not just orders, or how ill-equipped you are to do anything but stand idly by while Trump dissects the nation. You do nothing but dull the alarm you should be raising, and yet still you assume the public will flock to Democrats when your silent complicity with all the harm he has already wrought obviates the primary need to elect Democrats at all: to stop it. It will garner no votes to continue down this road of inaction. It will only cause Democrats to lose and the country to be lost—in 2026, or, at this rate, even sooner.

It is time to meet the moment; the only question is how you will decide to. If you stay this course, tightly gripping the reins of power while you sabotage the fight your party and your people are ready and desperate to enter, few will see you as any sort of hero. No message you could hope to deliver will ever be taken seriously if you persist in behaving in this obstructive way. Whatever you may have accomplished in your career will be lost to the sands of time and you will be written into history as a Vichy clown, plagued by obtuse cowardice, who used his own power to make sure the nation would suffer the consequences of his own personal failures.

But if you are the public servant, the statesman, and the man you want to be remembered as, or indeed anywhere near qualified for the leadership role you are trying so hard to hold onto, then the true power play of such a leader is to stand aside. Even if you are at last ready to step up, to lead the fight that must be led, giving way to another may still be the best medicine, to bring something new to the calcified corridors of Congress. How things once were is no longer how they are now, and it is time for a different playbook than the one you had mastered. But you of all people should of course understand the importance of getting out of the way; after all, if you could yield to the GOP on the continuing resolution because you thought it was the right thing to do for the future, then you can yield to your own party for the same reason.

But if you do yield, now, under your own power, with the gratitude of the nation, you can do so knowing that we are a country that understands and appreciates the value of a noble sacrifice for the public good. And how for nearly 250 years we have celebrated those who set aside their power voluntarily, which is a lesson we all would benefit from being reminded of through your example.

Choose, then, to stand down as Senate Minority Leader, as the affirmative gift you are giving to the country you love.

And choose it before it is chosen for you.

Filed Under: chuck schumer, democracy, democrats, donald trump