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I don’t want to say I told you so. Because lots of people were saying similar things. But I think I was right when I said that Chuck Schumer didn’t grasp the magnitude or the intensity of the fissure he was opening up in the Democratic Party with his handling of the Musk/Trump continuing resolution. (I said he was like one of those Chernobyl victims who’s already been fatally irradiated but seems fine. Radiation poisoning takes a few days to get you.) They thought it was just the online resistance types acting up and wanting a fight. They didn’t understand the depth of it. I’m pretty certain Schumer didn’t think he’d still be making the rounds of the morning shows going on two weeks later trying to hold on to his job.
In my mind, the real failure wasn’t even so much the one people watched play out a week ago. The real failure was in the preceding six weeks. I still think they should have refused the continuing resolution for all the reasons we discussed at the time. But by that time the Democrats really were in a jam. By laying no groundwork for the coming confrontation, they’d made it a much harder choice. In the internal hand-wringing I picked up in the 24 hours before Schumer’s cave, people were saying, “Yeah, we should be fighting. But it’s basically too late.”