The “incandescent” anger directed at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) from the members of his party is, in part, a distraction from fighting against the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its effort to overhaul the federal government, according to CNN political contributor Paul Begala.
Begala, an adviser to former President Clinton, said he has “never seen the party this angry at its leader, Senator Schumer.”
“It’s incandescent. It’s hard for me to describe. They’re furious. And here’s why. He had something very valuable. He had voted to pass the continuing resolution that Republicans could not do without them. And he traded them away for nothing,” the veteran consultant said during his Monday appearance on CNN’s “The Lead.”
Schumer, the Democrats’ longtime leader in the Senate, is facing pushback over his vote to help advance a House-crafted continuing resolution that ended up being adopted last week. The New York senator’s decision is being questioned by some of his Democratic colleagues in the chamber.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who has advocated for loudly opposing Trump’s agenda, told The Hill that Democrats in the upper chamber are risking ending up “irrelevant if we don’t use our power on cloture to demand that we have a seat at the table,” adding that “we obviously have to make sure that we aren’t cut out of negotiations in the future.”
Begala said that he and “most” Democrats do not want a government shutdown, but argued the party caved “without a compromise.”
“I want the government to stay open. Most Democrats do. The funding level is actually not all that bad. There was some terrible stuff they added to it. But when I came to them a month ago, seriously, this was strategic as well as tactical,” Begala said Monday. “Tactical was bad to cave without a compromise. Strategically, he should have come to his party a month ago and said, here are our principles.”
The political commentator said the Democrats in the Senate could have worked more to draw out concessions from GOP lawmakers, but the spotlight should be aimed at the DOGE, the Musk-led advisory board whose staffers have gained access to several government agencies as part of the administration’s push to downsize the scope of the government workforce, cut spending and reduced waste.
Begala said that, for him, such action would’ve been a “crackdown” on the people “working for Mr. Musk in destroying our Constitution.”
