WASHINGTON — At the beginning of the year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was staring into a political abyss: Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., had just knifed President Joe Biden’s signature legislation, and Schumer’s push to change the Senate rules to pass voting rights legislation was similarly killed by Manchin and another centrist Democrat.
With inflation on the rise and the midterm elections on the horizon, Democrats’ fears of suffering a massive blowout were rising. Some within the party were privately pointing fingers at Schumer. The 50-50 majority, which has been unkind to Senate leaders in the past, seemed to be slipping from his grasp.
“Everyone said Democrats are gonna lose a whole ton of seats,” Schumer said during a wide-ranging interview in his Capitol Hill office. “People said, ‘Well, Democrats — can they get anything done?’ At that point, it was a down moment.”
A year later, the New York Democrat is taking a victory lap.
He cut a deal with Manchin to revive major portions of Biden’s landmark bill, which became the largest investment in combating climate change in U.S. history. He oversaw a string of major bipartisan victories, including the most significant gun safety law in 30 years, a priority of his that appeared all but dead. And he defied the long odds of history by expanding his majority in the midterms.
“The only dispute: Is it the most productive two years in 50 years since the Great Society, or the most productive in 100 years since the New Deal?” Schumer said.
It’s not all good news for Schumer. Democrats may have held the Senate, but they narrowly lost the House majority to Republicans, which could spell the end of the party’s biggest legislative goals. And despite Schumer’s confidence that he’ll hold the Senate majority again in 2024, the map presents enormous challenges.
Schumer expressed no regrets about how he dealt with Manchin, including during Build Back Better talks last year when he concealed a letter in which the West Virginia centrist vowed not to spend as much as the House was considering. Many Democratic staffers were furious with Schumer, saying they wasted months of valuable time on a fool’s errand. Schumer’s aides said at the time he was trying to change Manchin’s mind.
“Look, when one way doesn’t work you try another,” Schumer said.
In dark moments like the failure of the Build Back Better Act and voting rights legislation, Schumer said he remembers two lessons from his late father, Abraham Schumer, who died last year at 98. “He taught me, first, always try to help people who need help. The second thing he taught me was, when you’re engaging in a major endeavor, look in your heart, make sure it’s the right thing, and then persist and persist and persist and never give up.”
Schumer said he sought to “resuscitate” the Democrats-only bill after a “few months of a cooling off period” in early 2022. “I always kept my respectful relationship with Manchin, even though we disagreed on a whole lot.” He flashed his flip phone as “my secret to success.”
Apart from that bill, Congress has racked up bipartisan achievements that include a renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, the CHIPS and Science Act to boost domestic industries and counter China, an overhaul of the Postal Service to improve its budget, a measure to assist veterans exposed to toxic burn pits.
Some Republicans at the center of various deals say Schumer — who rose to prominence in part while cultivating a reputation as a sharp-elbowed partisan — gave them the space to operate.
“He was involved in CHIPS. I worked with him closely on that,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said. On the rest, he said, Schumer’s role was “mostly sitting back and allowing us to do our bipartisan work.”
Others don’t have anything positive to say about him.
Asked about Schumer’s role in the bipartisan pursuits and centrist deal-making, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine — who…