Chuck Schumer

Charles Ellis Schumer (born November 23, 1950) is an American politician who became Senate Majority Leader on January 20, 2021. He is the senior United States senator from New York and a member of the Democratic Party.

As I ride my bike around New York City on the weekends, I see what immigrants do for America.

Quotes

2006

• This is an excellent program. Nobody has said it has done a bad job. It is small. There are only about 50,000 visas a year. ... As I ride my bike around New York City on the weekends, I see what immigrants do for America. This program has dramatically helped.
  • Floor speech in the Senate (24 May 2006) celebrating the diversity visa program, as reported and quoted in "Schumer on Diversity Visa: 'This is an Excellent Program'" by Neil Munro, Breitbart.com (1 November 2017)

2009

• People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens, and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who entered the U.S. legally.
  • Gorka: Dems Only Care About 'Power' & 'Taking Down' Trump, Not Protecting Americans, Fox News (29 December 2018)

2010

• People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who enter the United States legally.
  • Speech on immigration (24 June 2009), quoted in "Schumer talks tough on immigration reform issue" by Tom Brune, Newsday.com (18 April 2010)

2013

• Assault weapons were designed for and should be used on our battlefields, not on our streets. There is no inalienable right to own and operate 100-round clips on AR-15 assault rifles.
  • At the introduction of the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 (Gibson, Ginger (January 24, 2013). "Feinstein floats assault weapons ban". Politico. Retrieved on September 6, 2018. ).

2018

• President Trump turned away from not one but two bipartisan compromises. Each would have averted this shutdown....It is something the majority could have avoided entirely, a concern the president could have obivated, if he were only willing to take yes for an answer.
  • Floor speech to the Senate (22 January 2018) on the bipartisan agreement in the senate to end the government shutdown, quoted at ABC 10 News

Speech to the U.S. Senate (21 December 2018)

Remarks to the Senate with less than twelve hours before a shutdown of the U.S. government was to occur as existing funding expired without a new budget passed and in place. Schumer specifically addressed previous remarks by President Donald Trump that he desired and would take responsibility for a shutdown of the American government, which did indeed occur, and cited the Senate's bipartisan efforts to prevent a shutdown. Televised by CNN live on 21 December 2018: Schumer to Trump: You will not get your wall, abandon your shutdown strategy.

• This may have been the most chaotic week of what's undoubtedly the most chaotic presidency ever in the history of the United States. The stock market is in a tumult and decline. The Secretary of Defense, one of the only steady pairs of hands in our government, is resigning from the administration in protest. And the United States is pulling out of Syria and likely Afghanistan, abandoning our coalitions, allies, and the Kurds, and surrendering the field to Putin, Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Taliban, and Bashar Al-Assad. The position of Defense Secretary, of Attorney General, of Ambassador to the United Nations, of Interior Secretary, and even Chief of Staff to the President are all in flux. The institutions of our government lack steady and experienced leadership. With all of these departures it's about to get even more unsteady. The President is making decisions without counsel, without preparation, and even without communication between between relevant departments and relevant agencies. All of this turmoil is causing chaos in the markets, chaos abroad, and it's making the United States less prosperous, and less secure. And to top it all off, President Trump has thrown a temper tantrum and now has us careening toward a Trump shutdown over Christmas.
• There are not the votes in the Senate for an expensive, taxpayer-funded border wall. So, President Trump: You will not get your wall. Abandon your shutdown strategy. You're not getting the wall today, next week, or on January 3rd when Democrats take control of the House. Just two days ago, the Senate came together to support a proposal by leader McConnell; unanimously- every Democrat, every Republican- to extend government funding through February without partisan demands. What it would accomplish would be the government would not shut down. The fights that we're having would be postponed to a later day, and millions of Americans would not be hurt this Christmas week. So let me repeat that: the Senate- every Democrat, every Republican- has already unanimously supported a clean extension of government funding. Democrats supported the measure because we do not want to see the government shut down. We have no demands other than that. We had every indication the President would sign the legislation, as did our friends, the Republicans on the other side of the aisle in the Senate.
• But yesterday, President Trump, hounded by the radical voices of the hard right, threw another temper tantrum, and here we are, once again, on the brink of what the President has spent months saying he wanted: a Trump shutdown. The President will try to do his best to blame Democrats, but it's flatly absurd. President Trump called for a shutdown no less than twenty-five times. In our meeting in the Oval Office, President Trump said, quote: "If we don't get what we want, I, President Trump, will shut down the government." "I am proud to shut it down," said President Trump. "I'm not going to blame you," meaning Democrats, "I will take the mantle of shutting it down." Those are President Trump's words and nothing he says or does today can undo that. No Democrat has called for shutting the government down. We are all working to avoid it. The President seems to relish it. He seems to feel it'll throw a bone to his base. The problem being, his base is less than one quarter of America. Mr. President, President Trump- you cannot erase months of video of you saying that you wanted a shutdown and that you wanted the responsibility and blame for a shutdown. President Trump, you own the shutdown. You said so in your own words.
• Each of those proposals contains 1.3 billion dollars of real border security, not a wall. There's no wall in those proposals. Democrats support real border security, not a wall. And by the way, that is in addition- in addition- to the 1.3 billion dollars in border security Congress allocated last year, the majority of which the Trump administration has not yet spent. They're asking for loads of more money? They haven't even spent last year's money. It's clearly a political gambit by President Trump to appease his never-happy base.
• But there is only one way we will have a Trump shutdown: if President Trump clings to his position for an unnecessary, ineffective, taxpayer-funded border wall that he promised Mexico would pay for.

2021

• [the attack on the Capitol] was an insurrection against the United States, incited by the president. This president should not hold office one day longer
  • Top Democrat Schumer calls for Trump's removal from office after Capitol riot January 7, 2021 (said in reference to the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol)

• The best thing to do is to get rid of him [Trump]. I don’t trust him one bit.
  • According to Pence opposes using 25th amendment to remove Trump from office, despite pleas from Pelosi and Schumer January 7, 2020

• It will be a fair trial, but make no mistake, there will be a trial, and when that trial ends senators will have to decide if they believe Donald John Trump incited the erection insurrection against the United States.
  • 22 January 2021 (also quoted by The Wrap)

• It has to be the legislation itself, it has to be big bold and strong. If Republicans work with us to get good strong legislation then yes... but look at 2008 where we spent a year and a half trying to get something good done, ACA (Obamacare), and we didn't do all the other things that needed to be done. We will not repeat the same mistake.
  • in an interview with Rachel Maddow January 25, 2021

• If one political party believes "heads we win, tails you cheated," if one political party believes that when you lose an election, the answer isn't to win more votes, but rather to try to prevent the other side from voting, then we have serious and existential threats to our democracy on our hands.
  • interview reported on March 20, 2021

• What is needed now is a long-term solution so we don’t go through this drama every few months.
  • About the short-term debt limit increase "Republicans Begrudgingly Vote For Debt Limit Deal McConnell Made With Democrats" (October 7, 2021)

Quotes about Schumer

• The leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold political power. They know this. They would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the last three decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.
  • Chris Hedges in The Coming Collapse, Common Dreams, (21 May 2018)

• We know the agenda of the left because Chuck Schumer told us he was going to take Georgia and then change America. And we know that radical agenda is not just high taxes, open borders, defunding the police, government-run health care.
  • Kelly Loeffler according to Sen. Loeffler: Warnock’s values are ‘out of step with Georgia aired January 3, 2020

• There was a strange aftertaste to many of the calls for grand social reform in 2020. As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amidst the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States experimented with denial. For them climate skepticism and virus skepticism went hand in hand. In Mexico, the notionally left-wing government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador also pursued a maverick path, refusing to take drastic action. Nationalist strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey did not deny the virus, but relied on their patriotic appeal and bullying tactics to see them through. It was the managerial centrist types who were under most pressure. Figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the United States, or Sebastián Piñera in Chile, or Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen, and their ilk in Europe. They accepted the science. Denial was not an option. They were desperate to demonstrate that they were better than the 'populists.' To meet the crisis, very middle-of-the-road politicians ended up doing very radical things. Most of it was improvisation and compromise, but insofar as they managed to put a programmatic gloss on their responses—whether in the form of the EU's Next Generation program or Biden's Build Back Better program in 2020—it came from the repertoire of green modernization, sustainable development, and the Green New Deal.
  • Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World Economy (2021)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Chuck Schumer on Wikipedia
• Media related to Charles Schumer on Wikimedia Commons