Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rightfully charged his Republican counterparts Tuesday with "abdicating their responsibilities" to protect our elections by blocking election security legislation. But when it comes to initiating impeachment against Donald Trump, the guy who's trying to sell the presidency to the highest foreign bidder, Sen. Schumer is exhibiting a heavy dose of the urgency of whenever.
“We don’t know all of it yet and the more new facts come out the better informed decision the American people and then the Congress can make on this issue,” Schumer told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday. "So I think the strategy of getting as much of the facts out and then months down the road making a decision on impeachment ... is the right strategy.”
Schumer may have missed this, but the American public is currently being starved of facts, at least partly due to the absence of a formal impeachment proceeding and the investigative powers that inherently accompany it.
But Schumer slouching away from anything that might smell like offense for Democrats is perfectly on brand. If you want to be truly infuriated, check out the recent reporting that Schumer counseled his caucus to back off from questioning Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh too aggressively following the gripping testimony from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
Schumer reportedly argued that "there was no way...that Kavanaugh could survive," according to a new book from Ryan Grim, We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement. (Full disclosure, I co-wrote the LGBTQ chapter of this book with Grim, but played no part in any of the other chapters.) Anyway, Grim writes that Schumer urged his caucus not to do anything that could somehow be twisted into making Kavanaugh look like the victim. And then somehow, Senate Democrats, under Schumer's leadership, managed to squander the opportunity handed to them by Blasey Ford’s gutsy testimony.
When Trump put the presidency up for sale last week, he invited congressional Democrats to revisit their constitutional obligations. Some of them, like California swing district Rep. Katie Porter, did review those responsibilities and conclude that they could no longer continue to look the other way—even if it would be easier.
But not Schumer. He’s rightfully blaming Republicans for making our elections vulnerable to foreign attacks while arguing that Democrats should let Trump’s open invitation for foreign interference slide. That’s a double standard if there ever was one.