Free Republic

Lovers of vivid political language will miss Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who announced his retirement last week. Senator Reid is infamous for his searing, pointed comments about conservatives – and his regular “walk-backs” of those outbursts. But the loquacious Senator Schumer, who is widely expected to succeed Reid as Democratic leader, has developed his own brand of bombast that relies less on Reid’s personal taunts and more on sweeping indictments of his opponents’ purported political sins. Schumer, who served 18 years in the House before joining the Senate in 1999, is fond of labeling Republicans “out of...

Chuck Schumer is set to get a big promotion -- and that's welcome news to Wall Street. The veteran Democratic senator from New York is widely expected to take Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's job when he retires at the end of 2016. Reid, who announced he would not be running for reelection Friday morning, quickly endorsed his New York colleague for the role. Schumer's ascension to the top Democratic position in the Senate -- and even possibly to Senate majority leader if his party regains control of the chamber -- is a boon for the finance and business communities,...

Sen. Chuck Schumer says tea party members "hate immigrants," and blames congressional Republicans' fear of their hard-right members for preventing passage of a Senate immigration bill last year. (SNIP) "Why doesn't he? Because the tea party, these 80 to 100 folks from the hard right, none from New York, say they hate immigration, they hate immigrants.

In a speech on Senate floor last week, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King was controlling the party’s position on immigration and derailing immigration reform. (SNIP) Thursday, King responded to Schumer’s comment on the House floor saying it was Schumer not him who represented the fringe. Specifically King said Schumer represented “socialists, marxists, progressives, liberal Democrats.”

Harry Reid endorsed Chuck Schumer to succeed him as Senate minority leader after he retires in 2016. [Snip] Reid predicted Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in Senate leadership, would win the post without opposition. He also suggested any competition — specifically Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, with whom he spoke on the phone with Friday morning — should stand down. Reid called Schumer "extremely smart" in the interview, adding that he would bring a "different style" to Senate leadership compared with Reid's soft-spoken nature.

In response to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent remarks and reelection, a senior Obama administration official tells Politico that the United States may withdraw support of Israel at the United Nations. According to Politico's Michael Crowley, "the official wouldn’t rule out a modified American posture at the United Nations, where the U.S. has long fended off resolutions criticizing Israeli settlement activity and demanding its withdrawal from Palestinian territories." “We are signaling that if the Israeli government’s position is no longer to pursue a Palestinian state, we’re going to have to broaden the spectrum of options we pursue going forward,”...

Emboldened by winning the shutdown showdown over homeland security, and poised to triumph on raising the debt limit, Senate Democrats set their sights Thursday on the budget sequesters, demanding that Republicans hike taxes and raise spending. It was a shot across the bow for Republican budget writers, who are set to unveil their proposals next week, which are expected to further slash spending and balance the budget in 10 years — slowing the growth of runaway national debt that currently tops $18 trillion. Senate Democrats insisted that keeping the automatic spending cuts would jeopardize the economic recovery, hurt the middle...

The Talk Shows March 8th, 2015 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. ; former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; Lewis.FACE THE NATION (CBS): Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Tim Scott, R-S.C.; Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.; Benjamin Crump, lawyer for the family of Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson.THIS WEEK (ABC): Mayor James Knowles of Ferguson, Missouri;...

Senate Democrats are pressuring Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to bring the attorney general nomination of Loretta Lynch to the floor, with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) telling reporters on a conference call that a “hard right Republican temper tantrum on immigration” was keeping her from assuming Eric Holder’s job. Lynch does have the support of some Republicans. Three GOPs including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) backed Lynch during last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee vote. “It’s time to turn the page on Eric Holder’s tenure as Attorney General. We need a fresh start in the position, and this is an opportunity for...

ALBANY, N.Y. (CBSNewYork/AP) — Sen. Charles Schumer is urging the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to make measles shots free and widely available, like the flu vaccine. Schumer, D-N.Y., made the recommendation Sunday, noting that the CDC says at least 102 people have contracted measles in 14 states, including New York and New Jersey, so far this year. There was a record number of cases last year — 644 in 27 states. “It’s clear that we need to get on top of this highly contagious disease before it becomes too big for us to control,” Schumer told reporters, including...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says fellow Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer’s (N.Y.) recent comments on ObamaCare are "beyond comprehension." Schumer caused a stir last month when he said Democrats “blew the opportunity the American people gave them” in 2008 by focusing on healthcare out of the gate instead of on measures to boost the middle class. In an interview with The Washington Post published Monday, Pelosi noted that Schumer wrote the 1994 assault weapons ban that was blamed for Democratic losses that year. She hit Senate Democrats for distancing themselves from President Obama in the midterm elections, and the...

WASHINGTON—It used to be that Democrats would mutter under their breath about President Barack Obama and the White House. Now, with the midterm elections behind them, some leading members of the president’s own party are airing their frustrations with little restraint and charting their own course. In speeches, negotiations and congressional hearings, several high-profile Democrats are disregarding the White House in ways large and small. The White House has responded with an extraordinary veto threat while Obama has made a round of calls to liberal Democrats urging them to stand up against their own leadership.

Let us count the times Sen. Chuck Schumer has blown himself up politically. That was a short count, wasn’t it? Whatever else might be said of him, Chuck Schumer is not in the habit of self-immolation. But progressives have been lining up to vilify New York’s senior senator as the Democratic Party’s village idiot for saying before Thanksgiving that ObamaCare was a political mistake. He even said that focusing on health care, the party’s magic mountain, was “the wrong problem.” David Axelrod accused Sen. Schumer of being, ugh, a professional politician, whose “abiding principle” is how to win elections. That’s...

In a satisfying moment of intramural recrimination this week, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York pointedly second-guessed President Obama’s decision to push sweeping health care legislation in 2010, when Americans were more concerned with the state of the economy and their economic futures. (SNIP) Even if you don’t think (as I do) that the “gang” bill would actually hurt the economic fortunes of many middle class Americans by importing competing, cheaper workers to bid down their salaries, it was hardly the sort of economic fix Schumer says the middle class was demanding. Even more than Obamacare, it failed to give...

Sen. Chuck Schumer upbraided his own party Tuesday for pushing the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010. While Schumer emphasized during a speech at the National Press Club that he supports the law and that its policies "are and will continue to be positive changes," he argued that the Democrats acted wrongly in using their new mandate after the 2008 election to focus on the issue rather than the economy at the height of a terrible recession.(snip) The third-ranking Senate Democrat noted that just about 5 percent of registered voters in the United States lacked health insurance before the...

Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-New York) comments on Wednesday about Democrats’ misguided focus on health care in President Barack Obama’s first term prompted backlash from top Democrats and left-leaning groups, who accused him of being politically craven. At a speech before the National Press Club in Washington on Tuesday, Schumer said Democrats made a mistake by entering into a fight over health care after they passed the 2009 economic stimulus. His reasoning: Democrats were targeting the uninsured, a population that he said makes up only about 5 percent of registered voters. Only about one-third of the uninsured, he said, are registered...

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said Tuesday that he and his fellow Democrats made a mistake in pursuing health care legislation that eventually became Obamacare. Bloomberg Politics's Kathleen Hunter has the story: “Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them” in electing Obama and a Democratic Congress in 2008 amid a national recession, Schumer of New York said in a speech in Washington. “We took their mandate and put all our focus on the wrong problem -- health care reform.”Democrats should have addressed issues aiding the middle class to build confidence among voters before turning to the...

Before her remarks, Landrieu was spotted riding the escalator alone up from the Senate trains that carry lawmakers between their offices and the Capitol, toward a row of elevators. She was stone-faced and declined to answer questions from reporters. Once she reached the top level and stepped off, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of his party’s top campaign strategists, walked over. Smiling, he asked Landrieu to step aside for a private conversation. She shook her head and moved briskly toward the elevator. As she did, she pointed to her phone, saying she had a call. Schumer paused for a...

Less than two months after their most joyous moment together, the relationship between the Obama White House and Senate Democrats went off track and has never recovered. Instead of basking in the victory glow of President Obama’s impressive 2012 reelection and an improbable two-seat gain for Democrats, they found themselves at the edge of the now infamous “fiscal cliff.” But Reid’s operation, along with his close ally, Sen. Charles E. Schumer, did not trust Obama’s negotiating skills. At that point, McConnell called Biden and famously asked: “Does anyone down there know how to make a deal?” Reid, Schumer and other...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...