MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes forced Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to confront his detractors Tuesday on live TV, playing a brutal supercut of other Democrats criticizing his controversial decision last week to back a Republican spending bill.
Hayes first asked Schumer if he has since reconsidered his decision given the “enormous backlash” to the six-month continuing resolution, which averted a government shutdown.
Schumer maintained that he hasn’t, and that he knew when he made the call that it would “get a lot of flack.”
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As a result of the backlash—which has been on display from Democrats on several cable news shows—Schumer had to postpone a scheduled book tour, with security concerns top of mind.
Hayes played some of the criticism Schumer has received from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Chris Murphy, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
Ocasio Cortez, who had opposed the passage of the spending bill, said, “I think there is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal. And this is not just about progressive Democrats. This is across the board, the entire party.”
Pelosi, meanwhile, told reporters Tuesday: “I, myself, don’t give away anything for nothing. And I think that’s what happened the other day.”
Schumer essentially reiterated what he had said on The View earlier in the day: that there were only two choices, and a government shutdown would have been “so much worse.”
“Under a shutdown, the executive branch has absolute power to determine what is essential, right? They have the sole power,” he said.
“You have these fanatics, these anti-government, vicious nihilists in charge. They can say anything is not essential,” he went on.
“So it could have been today if we were in the shutdown, and they said feeding hungry children [is] not essential. Eliminate SNAP—two days from now. The only thing we need in transportation are air traffic controllers. Cut off all mass transit funding to New York and the other cities of the country. All transit funding. Day six: Medicaid. They could cut off Medicaid almost totally. So within two weeks, they could just so decimate the federal government—almost throwing a bomb at it—that we could never recover.”
Schumer added that getting out of a shutdown is also solely dependent on the executive branch.
“One Republican senator who is close to these horrible DOGE-Musk people said that they expected to close it down for six months, nine months, ‘til the whole federal government was obliterated,” he explained.
“Musk’s dream to get $2 trillion out of the federal government could happen under a shutdown, so I felt the very people who were upset now, if we went through with the shutdown and all these things happened, would be coming two or three weeks later and saying, ‘Get it open, get SNAP open, get mass transit open.’ I’d say, ‘Well, it’s a shutdown. We can’t.‘ They’d say, ‘Well, why’d you let that happen?‘”
