Chuck Schumer is playing this exactly right
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer takes a lot of crap from a lot of liberal pundits, but they never can seem to spell out their supposed beef with him. It usually comes down to their insistence that there’s a magic wand out there for immediately making the entire Democratic Party agenda happen, and that Schumer is weak because he’s not waving that magic wand.
But back in the real world, Schumer is actually quite savvy. He got the COVID relief package passed with just fifty votes. He got the Senate parliamentarian to agree to additional reconciliation bills, which means President Biden’s infrastructure package will pass with fifty votes once the Republicans finally admit they’re not going to cooperate on it.
Schumer is also doing something else: he’s helping ensure that when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi inevitably appoints a select committee to investigate the Capitol attack, she’ll be able to compellingly argue that the Democrats tried to work with the Republicans on this, and that the Republicans simply refused.
To that end, Chuck Schumer is reportedly about to force a Senate vote on the bipartisan 1/6 commission. To be clear, this vote is intended to fail. Unless a number of Senate Republicans change their minds at the last minute, they’ll end up filibustering against the commission, painting themselves as unpatriotic and guilty in the process. Then Pelosi will appoint the committee she was going to appoint anyway, and Schumer will have helped her by forcing Senate Republicans to very loudly adopt a villain stance against investigating the Capitol attack at all.
