Begging for Unity: Chuck Schumer Fears GOP Will Follow His Lead

The soon-to-be minority leader wants fair treatment from the new Senate majority – but what is fair? 

By James Fite | Nov 17, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

Republicans swept the 2024 election, winning a trifecta in the halls of power the left simply didn’t see coming. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) certainly didn’t see it coming. He predicted back in August that Democrats would keep the Senate majority – and now he’s begging for bipartisanship. The New York lawmaker was ready for war when he thought his party might nab the trifecta, but now he’s suing for peace. What goes around comes around, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, you reap what you sow, or something about a pot calling a kettle black – whatever witty expression you choose, the world Schumer now faces as soon-to-be minority leader is one of his own making.

Chuck Schumer and the Plea for Unity

“To my Republican colleagues, I offer a word of caution in good faith,” Schumer said on the Senate floor after the blue trifecta he predicted turned out red instead. “Take care not to misread the will of the people, and do not abandon the need for bipartisanship. After winning an election, the temptation may be to go to the extreme. We’ve seen this happen over the decades, and it has consistently backfired on the party in power.”

Schumer certainly knows a thing or two about letting that power go to one’s head and “going to the extreme” – but more on that in a bit.

“So instead of going to the extremes, I remind my colleagues that this body is most effective when it’s bipartisan,” he continued. “If we want the next four years in the Senate to be as productive as the last four, the only way that will happen is through bipartisan cooperation.”

The senator seems to forget, however, just how partisan his legislative body has been since Democrats took the majority. Indeed, if it weren’t for former Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, the legislative landscape would look a lot different.

Foolin’ With the Filibuster

As Liberty Nation News reported back in August, Schumer sang a very different song when he thought Democrats might pull a trifecta of their own, sans Manchin and Sinema:

“The New York Democrat has held his seat for the last quarter century, and throughout that tenure, he has waffled back and forth on whether to protect or destroy this particular upper-chamber tradition – seemingly based entirely on which side of the majority he happens to be at the time. Well, Democrats currently hold a slim 51-vote majority, and Schumer made it clear this week that if Kamala Harris wins in November, Democrats maintain the Senate lead, and if they win even a razor-thin majority in the House, the filibuster is as good as dead.”

At that time, Schumer told Politico he was planning to end the 60-vote rule for legislation to pass two voting rights bills. He also toyed with the idea of codifying abortion access into federal law and even expanding the Supreme Court from nine justices to 13.

Bored? Check This Out!

In fact, he tried to kill it in 2022, and the only reason he failed is that then-Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema stood firm on protecting the filibuster. Once those two perpetual thorns in his side left the party and announced they wouldn’t run for re-election, Sen. Schumer figured the filibuster was as good as dead in the 119th Congress. “We got it up to 48, but, of course, Sinema and Manchin voted no; that’s why we couldn’t change the rules. Well, they’re both gone,” he explained.

Democrats: Define “Unity”

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “unite” as “to put or come together to form a single unit,” or “to cause to cling together.” Unity is defined as the “quality or state of not being multiple” or “a condition of harmony.” If you find yourself wondering why such a simple word needs to be explicitly defined here, it’s because Democratic Party elites – from Chuck Schumer to Joe Biden – seem confused about the topic. Both call for “unity” whenever it seems Republicans may have some power over them, yet then they turn around and try to steamroll right over any GOP resistance, all the while hurling insults at the politicians across the aisle and any Americans who support them.

Trump supporters are “garbage,” according to the sitting president, remember? Digging just a bit deeper into the memory hole, one might recall a time when congressional Democrats promised bipartisanship and unity only to betray their Republican colleagues once they got their way. As LNN Senior Political Analyst Tim Donner wrote back in 2021 after the two-part “infrastructure” reconciliation debacle:

“After weeks of back-and-forth wrangling involving both parties, conflicting House and Senate priorities, and on-again, off-again agreements, the two parties have begrudgingly signaled their willingness to advance a roughly $1 trillion plan for actual infrastructure, which is aging or substandard – roads, bridges, rail, power grid, broadband internet – but they’ll only get it if they agree to roll over for another bill more than three times the size – somewhere beyond $3 trillion – for what it has amusingly termed ‘human infrastructure.’

…

“Much as there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, there are also good deals, bad deals, and outright blackmail. When a rare, truly bipartisan effort for a popular cause is sandbagged by a demand more closely resembling a ransom, an already deeply discredited institution edges dangerously close to the worst democracy has to offer – majority rule by brute force.”

To shamelessly steal a quote from Inigo Montoya, Mandy Patinkin’s character from the film The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Good Luck Chuck

Luckily for Schumer, Senate Democrats, and leftists nationwide, Republicans do plan to play nice – at least when it comes to the MAGA legislative agenda. Senate confirmation hearings will likely be put to the same majority bulldozer in the next Congress as they were in the current and previous ones now that there’s no filibuster on presidential appointments – even for the Supreme Court. But soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has vowed to protect the filibuster, no matter how much Democrats resort to the tactic to create a legislative logjam.

The best summary of the New Yorker’s plea comes from Byron York, chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner: “Please don’t do to us what we were going to do to you.” Despite Schumer’s total disregard for unity and willingness to pull the rug out from under his opponents whenever he held the upper hand, Republicans simply will not play the same game. So, at least regarding the filibuster, what goes around does not come back around. What’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander after all, and the pot calling the kettle black doesn’t apply.

~

Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Read More From James Fite

Bipartisanship or Gridlock? I'll Take Gridlock

By Rich Kozlovich

Over the years I've been asked what's the difference between Democrats and Republicans, and my answer is that Democrats want to take all your money and control every aspect of your life, and they want to do it right now. Republicans are willing to wait a week or two. Admittedly that's a bit trite, but it also demonstrates what's wrong with both parties. 

The Democrats are now out and out Marxists, and no matter how insane their views my be, at least they absolutely know what they think and what they want, all of which should be fought tooth and nail.  The Republicans, as a party, are clueless, and what's most disturbing is the electorate is even more clueless.  

If you take out the blatantly provable fact Democrats are being elected all over the nation via massive and nationally organized efforts at , you then have to believe the public is actually voting for Democrats.  Because if they are, that means they're in love with massive national debt, high energy costs, inflation, unbridled immigration, crime and drug gangs running out of control, overbearing regulations, medical tyranny, a totally collapsed and incompetent education system turning out propagandized dunderheads, a national policy to create victims who will receive taxpayer funded lifestyles and a massive overpaid under worked bureaucracy that is stunningly incompetent.   And the Republican leadership is party to all that, and has been for decades.

Currently there are two stories that play into this which are important. Spending, and Republican leadership in the House.  Since the Senate has already compromised any idea they're conservative and fiscally responsible with their choice of Mitch McConnell as their leader, the Republican's choice for Speaker of the House is the story, along with their latest budget spending frenzy for a  $1.7 Trillion Funding Deal:

Key lawmakers on Tuesday announced that they had struck a deal on the framework for funding the government through the end of the current fiscal year, with government funding set to run out on Friday. Retiring Senate Appropriations Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) announced that appropriators have “reached a bipartisan, bicameral framework that should allow us to finish an omnibus appropriations bill that can pass the House and Senate and be signed into law by the President,” according to Politico.

A deal that will contain Over 7,500 earmarks totaling $16 billion that will:

..."allow lawmakers to put “pork” in bills that fund projects in their districts — which could also be used to reward their donors and special interests. Breitbart News’s Joel Pollak said the typical argument lawmakers use for earmarks “is that they can help to relieve partisan gridlock. A politician might agree to break ranks with his or her party if there is something in it for the folks back home (or the campaign coffers).”

Senator Ron Paul, who has been a maverick among the Republican Senators for so long even the McConnell myrmidons don't bother to attack him, says the GOP has been emasculated by the budget deal, noting:  

“This brings upon us the lie that Republicans really are fiscally conservative. The Democrats aren’t. They will not pretend to be fiscally conservative. Not one of them up here gives a darn about the debt. The Republicans all profess to be, but when you make them vote on the PAYGO resolution, pay as you go, that we can’t have new spending without offsetting it, they always vote to exempt it. So the omnibus will be 3,000 pages. We’ll get it two hours before they want to pass it. No one will read it. But hidden in the 3,000 pages will be we’re going to wave PAYGO.” “It would take 41 votes. Forty-one votes would stop the big spending. If 41, one of us said no and held our ground until there was a compromise, we could force Democrats to reduce spending. We have completely and totally abdicated the power of the purse. Republicans are emasculated. They have no power, and they are unwilling to gain that power back.”

Former Speaker Republican John Boehner cried at Nancy Pelosi portrait unveiling.  What is wrong with these people's minds? has been an absolute embarrassment for so long I didn't think it possible he could be more embarrassing, but he's succeeded.  This was the guy who blamed 'knuckleheads in Congress' who listen to talk radio for shutdown.  "Knuckleheads" who were trying to stop all the insanity he was a party to. 

Nancy Pelosi, along with Schumer, has done more harm to this nation than anyone in recent years other than Obama and Biden, and this nitwit gets choked up and has tears, and his daughters admire Pelosi.  Imagine that!  And the conservatives in Congress were the "knuckleheads".

At what point will the Republican party develop a back bone and decide, enough is enough?  Never, as long as the current leadership is in place.  They're a corrupt and self serving bunch of spend thrifts, as the figures coming out of on the spending habits of the RNC since 2017 shows.  They've been living the high life on the donations of Republicans instead of getting good people elected, especially good conservative people who want to put a stop to all this.   

 

 Daniel Greenfield in his article,  The Value Systems of Two Americas,  notes:

And that gets at the heart of the Two Americas crisis. The Left has successfully warped the country, but its overall institutional capture successes were focused on using education and culture to capture the elites. And the elites are, for the most part, captured, especially on a generational level. The elites are ruthlessly and unthinkingly enforcing their value system, even as it changes from year to year, and its absurd paradigms on the country..............And many conservatives are coming to realize that. A country controlled by a minority elite that is out of step with the people and yet insists on regulating them is a tyranny, no matter whether the nature of that tyranny is political, cultural or economic.  Freedom comes from independence. As long as America is dominated by a leftist oligarchy, it can never be free.

America is in debt to the tune of over 30 trillion dollars and Biden, the Democrats and nitwit invertebrate Republicans are are pledging to give South Africa untold millions to "go green" for their energy.   A government that's so corrupt and violent they make the  look clean.

Apparently Biden sent the Taliban $40 million dollars in ‘humanitarian aid", and a $55 billion gift for Africa, in order to compete with the Chinese and Russians for the affections of corrupt and incompetent dictators.  Then another $1.1 billion for Ukraine.  Think about this.  What happens when and there's a peace treaty, who will pay to rebuild Ukraine?  Russia, or America? 

 

Years ago while in Washington DC for my industry's Legislative Day we saw a discussion between Pat Buchanan and who claimed she never saw corruption in Washington. Imagine that, but then that was before she became part of it when she was Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, angling everything to put the fix in for Hillary.   Make sure to follow the link. 

 

My comment to them was "there are a lot of people in this room who think the only time America is safe is when the Congress was gridlocked and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was fast asleep on the bench". 

 

Nothing has happened to change my mind, except now that Ginsburg is dead the nation is just a tiny bit safer, and since bipartisanship has gotten us into the mess we are now, maybe we should warmly embrace gridlock.  Extended gridlock! 

The Tyranny of Meaninglessness

Daniel Greenfield  April 20, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

Joe Biden is always redefining things by Bidenizing them into random strings of gibberish like “lying, dog-faced pony soldier” or turning them into Bidenisms.  But these days his administration is ambitiously trying to redefine the entire English language.

“I want to change the paradigm,” Biden told reporters. “I would like elected Republican support, but what I know I have now is I have electoral support from Republican voters. Republican voters agree with what I’m doing.”

Like every other word that comes out of Biden’s mouth, that’s a lie. A Gallup poll in March found that Biden’s approval rating among Republicans is at 8%. That’s down from 12% in February.

“What’s become crystal clear is that Biden has redefined bipartisan," Obama crony Rahm Emanuel argued. "And Washington is slow to catch up to the Biden definition.”

The Biden definition of bipartisan is having the support of 8% of Republicans.

Not only is Washington D.C. slow to catch up to the Biden definition of bipartisan, but so is the dictionary. Biden’s advisers however argue that the dictionary’s arc bends toward Biden.

“If you looked up ‘bipartisan’ in the dictionary, I think it would say support from Republicans and Democrats,” Anita Dunn, who has advised Biden and Harvey Weinstein, argued. “It doesn’t say the Republicans have to be in Congress.”

It doesn’t say that the Democrats have to be in congress either if it’s a book club. But if it’s bipartisan governing, then it has to be Republican and Democrat elected officials.

“The Biden definition of bipartisanship is an agenda that unifies the country and appeals across the political spectrum,” Mike Donilon, a senior Biden adviser, argued. “Presumably, if you have an agenda that is broadly popular with Democrats and Republicans across the country, then you should have elected representatives reflecting that.”

The Framers also thought so which is why they put into place a system of elected officials chosen by the people to represent them. Biden would like to replace that with claiming that Republicans support him in a poll so he can eliminate the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, add Puerto Rico, D.C., and his family home as states, and rule a one-party state.

Fresh off redefining ‘bipartisan’, the Biden administration also redefined ‘infrastructure’ to mean funding the Democrat welfare state.

“I mean, what is infrastructure? Historically, it's been: What makes the economy move,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, contended.

Since everything makes the economy move, in one direction or another, then everything is infrastructure. But if everything is infrastructure, then nothing is infrastructure.

In the hands of lefty linguists, infrastructure, like the Constitution or bipartisanship, ceases to be tethered to the dictionary or the meanings imbued by a bunch of old white male racists, and becomes a universal concept. Or as Granholm argued, “as the president said this week, that infrastructure evolves to meet the American people's aspirations.”

Infrastructure, like the living constitution, is constantly evolving to meet lefty aspirations. One day it’s a bridge, another day it’s abortion, and the end of free speech.

“We don't want to use past definitions of infrastructure, when we are moving into the future,” Granholm whined. Definitions are static. They exist in the past. But the party of progress, as embodied by a 78-year-old man who keeps stumbling over words and falling down, is using definitions from the future for Newspeak dictionaries that haven’t even been invented yet.

If ‘infrastructure’ or ‘bipartisanship’ mean whatever Biden says it does, then he’s an absolute dictator, and reality means whatever lying, dog-faced pony soldier decides it does this week.

But Biden is always redefining things.

The serial Democrat lecher started out, like Bill Clinton, by redefining sex. Except that Biden, in one of his first executive orders, redefined sex to mean some intangible psychologically subjective concept of sex not based on science or biology, rather than men and women.

Once you’ve redefined women out of existence, redefining bipartisan to mean a one-party state, and infrastructure to mean social services is easy. All it takes is the refusal to be bound by the narrow categories of the past and then bridges, gender, and tyranny can be surprisingly fluid.

Last year, Biden had already redefined being a Catholic.

“Biden Could Redefine What It Means to be ‘a Catholic in Good Standing,” the Washington Post argued. Predictably, the argument was all about a more fluid definition of Catholicism and “what kinds of Catholicism they think most urgently needs to be advanced”. The Biden brand involves “poverty, refugees and the environment” which has as much to do with Catholicism as Tikkun Olam’s emphasis on “poverty, refugees, and the environment” has to do with Judaism.

But when you’re already redefining the Constitution, gender, and the meaning of simple words, why not also redefine religion away from narrow categories of belief, and into an evolving religion of the future in which things mean whatever we want them to mean at any moment.

When words mean nothing, then ideas mean nothing, and it’s easy to redefine Catholicism and Judaism to mean Muslim immigration, Obamaphones, and subsidies for luxury ‘green’ SUVs.

As George Orwell rightly noted, the refusal to allow words to mean anything is tyranny.

Without objective meanings, there are no laws and therefore no rights. There are no restraints on the power of the state when it refuses to be bound by the mere definitions of words.

Democrats spent generations trying to nullify the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights by arguing about the meaning of “arms”. Now they’re trying to do the same thing to the First Amendment by putting forward exciting new definitions of “speech” and the “press”.

Recent mainstream media editorials attacking free speech include "Why Is Big Tech Policing Free Speech? Because the Government Isn’t", "Free Speech is Killing Us" and “Why America Needs a Hate Speech Law.”

That last one was written by a Biden transition official, who sneered that, “the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era” and that, “the framers believed that this marketplace was necessary” from which “magically, truth would emerge.” An important prerequisite for the emergence of truth is the magic of allowing people to speak and for words to mean something. When there’s no free speech or meaningful speech, truth dies.

In our exciting leftist future, we know that speech, like gender, infrastructure, and bipartisanship, have to be redefined to mean whatever the government has decided that it should mean.

The truth can only emerge from the government and its political media partners.

And if you doubt that, you probably believe that infrastructure means roads, that women exist, that free speech means the freedom to speak, rather than being told what you can say.

Bad speech “undermines the values that the First Amendment was designed to protect: fairness, due process, equality before the law,” the Biden transition official argued.

The only way to save the true values of the First Amendment is to destroy its literal meaning.

This is the same argument that you will find behind every Biden redefinition which insists on a definition so inclusive that it includes everything except what it actually means.

Catholicism and Judaism mean everything except their own traditional teachings. Sex means everything except men and women. Infrastructure means everything except roads and bridges.

And bipartisanship means everything except elected officials from two parties working together.

America also needs to be redefined from a country and a people to an idea that includes the entire world and everything in it, except its own citizens and a country with borders.

When America, like religion and words, means everything then it means nothing.

And who better than Joe Biden, who redefines sentences into incomprehensible word salads randomly assembled from a Scrabble session, to usher in the end of the English language.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.  Thank you for reading.

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center