https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/03/democrats-chuck-schumer-hakeem-jeffries
It’s time for Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to step down
Well past their pull date, and do nothing suggesting Trump is amok and unhinged and getting worse.
The item:
In a recent podcast conversation, the former spokesperson for Jeb Bush sat down with the leader of the House Democrats. Guess which one of them endorsed the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York?
“I was a Republican up until two minutes ago and I’m a capitalist, and I had Zohran on … it’s not really a close call, is it?” Tim Miller said to Hakeem Jeffries on his Bulwark podcast, to which a defensive-sounding House Minority leader replied: “What I can say is that he’s the only one I’m scheduled to talk to.”
Time and time again, Jeffries has refused to endorse his own party’s official candidate for mayor in his own city, two months after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York by double digits – including Jeffries’ own congressional district by eight points.
This is the same Democratic party leader who has insisted in the past that progressives should “vote BLUE (no matter who)”. But centrists? Apparently, they’re under no such obligation.
Amen.
Jeffries is not alone in his brazen hypocrisy. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader who represents the state of New York and lives in the city of New York, has also refused to endorse his own party’s official candidate for mayor of New York.
If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress.
If you want to understand why 62% of Democratic voters say “the leadership of the Democratic party should be replaced with new people,” again, look no further than Jeffries and Schumer.
Week after week, month after month, they embarrass themselves, undermine their colleagues and demoralize their voters. Theirs is a record of cowardice and capitulation.
Let’s start with Jeffries. In February, the hapless House minority leader wondered aloud: “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. They control the House, the Senate. And the presidency. It’s their government. What leverage do we have?” It was a shrug of impotence; a sign of pre-emptive submission only weeks after Trump’s inauguration.
He should wonder how any leverage was lost, look in the mirror, and resign his seat, as well as his leadership position. Guardian/Hasan continuing -
That same month, just days before Bernie Sanders began his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in front of packed arenas across the country, Jeffries “quietly met with more than 150 Silicon Valley-based donors … in tony Los Altos Hills”, reported Politico, in order to “mend fences” with the billionaire big tech bosses.
Donor love, over winning the spoils for the Party? Money can't buy you love. It is as if Jeffries is telling donors, fund lukewarm, and you'll win either way, rather than looking at how to win. For the people, Hakim, they count too, remember that please. If your favorite football team's coaching staff acted like that - it's not we want to win, it's we don't know how, and you've two teams in play and you donors will win with either because we quell progressives and progress of any kind - you'd howl for immediate firings.
In April, when Democratic members of Congress such as Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative Maxwell Frost were visiting El Salvador and raising the issue of Kilmar Ábrego García’s detention, the Bulwark reported: “The minority leader has discouraged further excursions to the country” (reporting that Jeffries later denied). Subsequent polling suggests those trips helped change public opinion on immigration and, especially, on the fate of Ábrego. Jeffries, though, can claim no credit for that shift in American sentiment.
Those were all in sequence. Opening paragraphs. Later -
Last month, Jeffries refused, again, to endorse Mamdani but then went further, telling CNBC that Andrew Cuomo’s baseless attack on Mamdani’s rent-stabilized apartment was a “legitimate issue” and that his campaign was “going to have to address it”. Can you imagine a Republican leader in Congress going on live television to throw their party’s mayoral candidate under the bus in this way?
Jeffries has become almost a parody of a weak, spineless Democratic leader. When he was asked recently about Trump’s fascistic deployment of troops to the streets of Washington DC, his response was to praise the DC attorney general’s “strongly worded letter”.
Well, you know who else likes to bring a “strongly worded letter” to a gunfight with Republicans? Yep. You guessed it. Chuck Schumer. The Senate minority leader bragged to CNN earlier this year about how he had reacted to Donald Trump’s attack on US universities by sending him “a very strong letter just the other day”.
To be clear: Schumer’s record on resisting Trump and fighting back against his authoritarian takeover of the US government has been as feeble and feckless as Jeffries’.
[...] It makes no sense to me that Schumer is still the leader of the Democrats in the Senate. The party lost the upper chamber on his watch, under his leadership, but Schumer chose to stay on and his colleagues let him. But when you lead your party to defeat in an election, shouldn’t you … lose your job?
As for Jeffries, the Democrats may win back the House of Representatives next November on the back of an anti-Trump wave, but what then? What vision will a Speaker Jeffries offer? What resistance will he provide to the wannabe dictator in the White House? What actual plan does he have to preserve and protect democracy in 2028?
Since Trump was inaugurated for a second time in January, Jeffries and Schumer have demonstrated time and again that they are not built for this particular moment. While Trump seeds the ground for an American dictatorship, these two top Dems pine for bipartisanship. While millions of rank-and-file Democrats across the country say they want leaders who will fight, Jeffries and Schumer fold. While younger Democrats like Mamdani and AOC offer energy and charisma, these two lackluster leaders in the House and Senate offer cringe chants and even cringier photo ops.
Not just East Coast lukewarm and feckless, but single state picks. Gotta say, it was not me who picked them. It was New York Dems who think the name Cuomo has gravitas, not laughter nationwide, worldwide. in the media, in the public eye.
Those two were picked by the party that managed to have a trainwreck's second term happen and then be very hot, while their leadership is disturbingly tepid. Check that either can still fog a mirror.
The impression, as if, again, not the party of progress but only the party of Not Trump. No message beyond the other choice sucks, so vote for us.
That lost with Harris, Gavin is a showman, and who else? There is that in truth, but get real. Choices exist, or can be found. It is a big party, and voters are finding good candidates with hearts and minds and courage. What's the problem in New York? The water? The koolaid?
Cowardly lions belong in Oz, not center stage, U.S. of A.
___________UPDATE__________
Highlighting one paragraph but not the one above it is that the top paragraphs depends on an WSJ poll, where WSJ paywalls it but MSN publishes it; while in any event I trust the Murdoch empire as little as I trust Jeffries and Schumer to lead things out of the abyss they seem content with. If the donors pay, and the hanger-on consultants get fed well, Jeffries and Schumer appear to feel they're doing their job.
Depends on what the job really is, and not how they feel about it. It the whole inner party has sunk to feeling you don't need to throw punches if the donors pay without them, the party is worse off than a leadership shakeup might help. The hope is the inner party as a whole is not as jaded or donor loving as those two "leaders."
Anyway, the people want reform, the Republicans gave them a crap-sandwich bill, so things are ripe for any Dems who will throw punches. Even a showman like Gavin will throw a punch or two.
Bernie and AOC packing their anti-oligarch campaign stops should say something, even with the media inattention it was given. The media do, also, seem uncritical of Schumer and Jeffries. Owned as they are that is not a surprise. Feed the consultant class and we're doing okay, win or lose, is unsound but is currently driving too much wrong way traffic. Fix it. JD and crowd will not fix a thing once Trump's second term goes lame duck after the 2026 elections. If it goes lame duck. It should, but might not.