"Step Down, Chuck!" (w/Sam Rosenthal)
From the group that gave us “Don’t Run, Joe.” [w/transcript]
Sam Rosenthal, Political Director of Roots Action, discusses Roots Action’s new “Step Down, Chuck” campaign. Sam describes the establishment backlash they faced with their 2022 “Don’t Run Joe” campaign vs. the current openness within Democratic circles to replacing Schumer. We also explore the deeper frustrations with Schumer’s weak leadership, conciliatory instincts, his ineffectuality during the shutdown fight, and his inability to energize or represent the party’s more progressive base.
Schumer’s deference to old Senate rituals, resistance to bold confrontation with Trumpism, and disconnect from shifting party dynamics have made him a liability—which is why petitions, public pressure, and a demand for new, more confrontational leadership are necessary to prevent Democrats from repeating the mistakes of past years.
“We Were Right When We Said ‘Don’t Run, Joe.’ Now We Say: ‘Step Down, Chuck’,” by Sam Rosenthal
TRANSCRIPT
Richard Eskow: It is almost an article of faith in certain quarters now that Chuck Schumer is not the right guy to lead the Senate Democrats. But it was also an article of faith in 2022 in certain quarters that Joe Biden was probably not the right candidate to run for president again in 2024. My next guest and his organization called on Joe Biden not to run in 2022, a call which turned out to be prophetic.
Now he and his organization are saying, which once said, don’t run, Joe. Are now saying, step down, Chuck. So, first of all, Sam Rosenthal, political director of RootsAction.org, welcome back to the program.
Sam Rosenthal: Thanks for having me here. Happy to be here again.
Richard Eskow: Yeah, it’s always good to have you. Now, let’s just begin with a brief flashback. In late 2022, Roots Action, as you write, you have a piece up in Common Dreams and ZNet, I believe, and elsewhere. The headline I saw was, “We Were Right When We Said ‘Don’t Run, Joe.’ Now We Say: ‘Step Down, Chuck’.”
When that piece came out in late 2022, most of the progressives on Capitol Hill were enthusiastically backing Joe Biden, as was the rest of the party. It was almost considered heresy to suggest that Biden wasn’t the right person for the job. Even though he appeared to be faltering in public appearances, polls had shown there was a lack of confidence in his ability health wise to handle a job.
Did you guys get a lot of heat for that?
Sam Rosenthal: Yeah, I would say we alternately got heat and were ignored by the establishment. One of the enduring memories of that time for me is when we went to the winter meeting of the DNC, and that was in Philadelphia in very early 2023. And so we had already, we had launched the campaign a few months prior and had been, you know, the first national group to say that Biden shouldn’t run for reelection, that he should pass the baton.
And so we were flyering and we had a big sign truck driving around outside the DNC hotel. I was standing outside and we were generating a lot of attention, both from DNC members, but also from domestic and foreign press. And the reaction we got from publicly from DNC members was, you’re being ridiculous, you’re being divisive.
You know, this is only going hurt the party’s chances. And by the sort of mainstream US Press, it was about the same. You know, aren’t you causing a problem where there is none? Why are you bringing this up? Why are you sort of trying to push for an internecine battle within the party.
But then, you know, when we talk to DNC members off the record, they would say, well, do you know anyone who’s thinking about running, who’s thinking about challenging him? Who else is with you? Who else have you talked to? And the foreign press also. I mean, they. They saw, you know, what our critique was.
They thought that it was a strong critique, that it made a lot of sense, and they took us very seriously. So it was a very interesting kind of bifurcated reality that we were experiencing there. But at the time, there was. The idea that the party would break ranks with Biden was just inconceivable.
Richard Eskow: And I don’t get the sense, before we go into the case for “step down, Chuck,” I don’t get the sense that this idea is as inconceivable in the party ranks or among the party leadership. Maybe they don’t want to talk about it that much. But I think that most people who hear that there’s such a campaign involved, the Democratic circles in one way or another, might not be as surprised or shocked as they were with the Don’t Run Joe campaign.
Do you think that’s a fair assessment? I think there’s disquiet about Chuck Schumer.
Sam Rosenthal: Yeah, I think that’s spot on. We’ve already seen members of the party break with Schumer. We had Ro Khanna, for example, has explicitly called for Schumer to leave the leadership position. We’ve had other elected Democrats say as much that they don’t believe that he’s the right person for the job anymore, that they are really disappointed in what’s happened in this most recent shutdown fight, which I’m sure we’ll talk about more.
And we didn’t see that at all in the early stages of our campaign, you know, telling Biden that he shouldn’t run for president again. So the ranks were really held among Democrats back then, but now I think the cleavages are much. They’re happening much more quickly. They’re much more obvious. And you see sort of mainstream media commentary in this country also that is more aligned with what we’re saying.
So I don’t know if that is because maybe the party has actually learned some lessons from, you know, the debacle with Biden. I’m not sure. I don’t think this is historically a party that has incorporated critiques very well, has learned from sort of past mistakes. But it’s possible that some members of the party have.
But it might also just be that Schumer has less of a following within the party, he’s less powerful, relatively speaking, than Biden and Biden’s sort of team around him were, and that there’s a sense that if Schumer leaves the leadership post, I think the party feels more confident that they can get a person who is.
Who has similar politics to Schumer’s, a similar philosophy of leadership to Schumer’s, that is, you know, more interested in compromise and keeping the lid on and keeping the sort of rancorous left in check than they were in the case of an open Democratic primary. I think a lot of the fear in asking for Joe Biden to step.
Step aside among sort of mainstream party activists was that progressives, people like us, were going to bum rush the presidential contest and that they might end up with, you know, a leftist at the top of the ticket, which is, I think, their worst nightmare. So it’s very different. It’s a very different feeling.
Richard Eskow: So they wound up selecting their 2024 candidate. How’d that work out for them? That’s a. That’s a rhetor question. Sorry.
Sam Rosenthal: Yeah.
Richard Eskow: So let’s, let’s go over just briefly, the case of, you know, I think there’s also something to be said for, unlike in 2022, everybody knows the party’s in deep trouble now. But let’s go over the case briefly at first, at least about just the bullet points of time, in your estimation, for Chuck Schumer to step down.
Sam Rosenthal: Yeah, it’s a bit of a paradox, really, where it seems that actually, for the first time since Trump was elected, the Democrats have a little bit of wind in their sails. The party had a really good election night last week. They had a couple banner wins, were able to secure the governorships in two important states, and had the win with Zohran Mamdani who, you know, although many parts of the Democratic Party really don’t like him, I think is undeniably a sort of comms and media culture victory for the party.
You know, this is someone who is really charismatic, is young, is very bright, and has gotten a lot of positive press for the Democrats. So there’s this moment where there’s an opportunity to really sort of drive hard at Trump and Trumpism. And we see that concurrent with those wins, Trumpism is really starting to collapse.
We have the internal divisions in the Republican caucus about the Epstein files and what to disclose and what not. And I think this is. This augurs real trouble for Trump, and his approval rating continues to crater. I think people, most Americans are not happy with the images they see of people being black bagged and abducted by ICE agents on the streets.
Most people are not buying the narrative that we are at war with narco-terrorism, that our cities are overrun by decay and crime. And I think that we’re going to see a commensurate drop in Trump’s polling numbers. So none of this has anything to do with what Schumer’s done as the leader of the party.
These are things that are happening independent of Schumer, who we think has just been a very weak leader. This latest collapse in the shutdown is redolent of the way Schumers led the party, which is that although he himself voted against reopening the government or the compromise to reopen the government, he was unable to keep his caucus together, to keep them holding the line, and to have the Democrats adopt a competitive, aggressive posture relative to the Republicans.
It’s been clear for a long time that the Republicans have no squeamishness about adopting hard line postures and holding them as long as is required. We’ve seen this, this is going on for decades and decades, but especially over the last 10 years with Mitch McConnell’s leadership in the Senate, they just have no problem being intransigent.
They don’t care about rules or decorum. They want to win. And people like me have been saying for a long time, where’s the fight from the Democrats? Where do we, where do we see a comparable posture? And we really don’t. And Chuck Schumer is part of that problem. So I think that this is just representative of his inability to adopt a fighting posture, to meet fire with fire from the Republicans.
And we need someone who has a more confrontational attitude in that leadership position.
Richard Eskow: And I think, you know, let’s talk about the shutdown for a second, because to me, the battle was lost before it began in terms of the shutdown. Because Chuck Schumer’s real failure of this so far of the second Trump presidency wasn’t, I think it was February when Trump was pushing his initial budget through.
That was the time, in my opinion, for the Democrats to stand their ground and say, this does terrible things for working people, for people who need medical care, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We won’t stand for it. And many, you know, I’m a big critic of the Democratic Party. Many members of the caucus did exactly that.
But it was Chuck Schumer who helped get that budget bill across the finish line for Donald Trump, wasn’t it?
Sam Rosenthal: Yeah, absolutely. And we should Note too that in this most recent shutdown, Schumer also was working really hard on a compromise, so called compromise deal with the Republicans that also would have sold off most of the Democrats stated policy preferences. So this has been his tendency over and over again is to sort of operate in this old school way where the Senate being a senator is about finding backroom deals that you can then, you know, move to the floor, you can have nice clean votes on them.
You can sort of go about the business of governing without too much mess or too much public displays of dissension or disagreement. And I just think that attitude is totally retrograde. It’s just not where we are at all anymore as a country. But it’s clear that he’s much more wedded to the sort of habits and rituals of the Senate and of being a senator than he is to delivering for his constituents, for delivering for working people in this country.
And that the earlier failure on the budget battle is just, just the right thing to point to as you do.
Richard Eskow: And the, you know, the other issue I wanted to bring up, not so much in terms of the shutdown, although that too, but the issue of Sauron Mamdani. Here you have a guy who’s from New York City in Chuck Schumer who wouldn’t endorse his own party’s candidate for mayor. This and of course, Hakeem Jeffries, his counterpart in the House, only did so a couple days before the election.
These are the people who are always telling the left, vote blue no matter who. But they are, in fact, vote Blue will tell you who. And if we, if you don’t do that, they may they feel free to leave the candidate out to dry. Now, I bring that up for a couple reasons.
One, it suggests to me that Chuck Schumer simply doesn’t understand the energy driving the party right now. But it also gets to look, there’s an uncomfortable dimension to the Chuck Schumer challenge as there was to the Joe Biden challenge. And I’d love your thoughts on this, Sam, which was in 2022, most voters were okay saying, geez, I don’t think this guy’s up to the job, because that’s what polls told us.
But in polite, we’re polite guys who were people in polite political circles, it was considered offensive sometimes to say, look, you know, whatever you think about Joe Biden, lovable guy, whatever, you know, the fact is he just doesn’t seem well enough. Now, in the case of Chuck Schumer, it’s not that he doesn’t seem well enough.
But everything about his communication style, his demeanor, his self-presentation, leaving aside some of the decisions he’s made, is the opposite of electrifying of what you’d hope to see from a leader. Now, we can argue about some of the decisions that Nancy Pelosi made, for example, but she brought a vibrance and energy.
Chuck Schumer seems exhausted and disheveled and not really on top of things. And you know, you may just feel free to disagree with me on all of the above, but that’s my assessment. And I think the one area where the conversation maybe is a little uncomfortable in political circles is this guy just doesn’t have what it takes to sell policies to the American people.
What do you think about that?
Sam Rosenthal: Yeah, I think that’s right. You know, our critique of Joe Biden and our critique of Schumer now has less to do with age, presentation, physical fitness, whatever you want to, however you want to talk about it, and more to do with their politics and their approach to politicking. And what we saw in Biden I think, is a lot of what we’re critiquing now in Schumer.
An ego driven politics that says, it’s my turn, I’m in control of the party, everyone has to listen to me. A sort of feeling about a hierarchy, an invisible hierarchy and disinclination at best to want to incorporate younger, more vibrant parts of the party, even when they disagree with them politically. I think a big part of the issue Chuck Schumer had with Mamdani was his stance on Israel.
And that was, I think, a personalized issue for Schumer. And it had a lot to do with why he never, never endorsed Mamdani for, for mayor of New York, even though everyone else in the party eventually grudgingly lined up and endorsed him. And I think Pelosi is a good counterpoint because I don’t agree with Nancy Pelosi’s politics.
She’s not someone whose sort of orientation, ideological orientation, I’ve appreciated in Congress. But she is someone who I think in her leadership role was more attuned to incorporating younger, more politically left members of the party. Not always. But on a personal level, it seems that she made some attempt to incorporate those people into the caucus and think about how to expand the tent.
I think she also did a lot of work to block those people from positions of power. But she was much more attuned to the idea that those are people who needed to be acknowledged as actors within the party. Whereas I think Schumer’s tendency, and Biden too, has been to sort of put their hands in their ears and hope that those people just go away and stop asking them challenging questions.
And so a lot of that speaks to this question about who’s a vibrant leader and who’s not. And I think Schumer just does not seem like he has the ear of individual caucus members, nor does he have his finger on the pulse in any way. He doesn’t have an ability to sort of gauge where the winds are going at this point and I think would just really like things to be the way they were in the Senate when he first got into the Senate, which was a long time ago.
And he’s unwilling to accept the new reality, whether it’s, you know, the character of his own party or how incredibly, cynically the Republicans have run their side of the show for a very long time.
Richard Eskow: And lest I be accused of ageism, which would have to mean somebody’s listening rather than watching as we speak, you know, Nancy Pelosi is at least a decade older than Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders, who does not have these problems of presentation, probably eight, nine years older. It’s not a matter of age, it’s a matter of, you know, what you can deliver in terms of leadership skills in their various forms.
But when we talk about leadership in the congressional sense, it’s a different, it’s a different ball of wax. A little bit said that, you know, congressional leaders like Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, they should see it that they have three constituencies, right? They have their own, they have to keep getting elected. They have their party’s voters and the vote electorate at large.
And then they have the members of their caucus, right? They have to somehow. So I think, you know, that threading the needle that you described with Nancy Pelosi, who, as you say, kept the left from real power but knew when to make them feel included and so on. It’s part of that she’s got, she understood that constituency, right?
She’s very, very skillful at that. And she lost me. We are not cat. We are, we are capitalists and that’s that.
Sam Rosenthal: Right?
Richard Eskow: But she was very skillful at that and I respect that. But Schumer and Pelosi do have, as part of this multi constituency role, one of the big expectations, I think, from their caucus members is that they’ll be fundraisers, that they’ll be money sources. And of course, Pelosi was prodigious at raising money.
I don’t know how well Schumer does at that. But the calculation that they always have to make, I would think is under their model. Not our model or the Bernie model or the Zoran model, but under their model of big finance campaigns. It’s, well, how much can I say without losing the money tree that keeps me as leader of this caucus?
You get what I’m saying?
Sam Rosenthal: Absolutely.
Richard Eskow: And, but I don’t even feel, you know, that frustrated me at times with Pelosi, for example, but I don’t even feel skilled from Schumer at that. I mean, I haven’t tracked the money flow through him, but it seems to me that he’s not communicating a goal for his role for his party, for his caucus.
Sam Rosenthal: Yeah.
Richard Eskow: What do you think of that? I mean, where does money fit into all of this? With the challenge of Chuck Schumer.
Sam Rosenthal: Yeah, I think that’s just right. And it speaks to the larger question of how a leader controls their caucus or not. You know, we’ve seen a lot of coverage about this, this collapse and some people who are more partisan to Schumer’s side maybe have pointed out he voted no. He voted no on this.
What do you want him to do? He can’t, you know, make other members of the Senate vote a certain way. But I think that that either intentionally or not, really sort of downplays the behind the scenes dynamics, many of which have to do with money and fundraising and also just a, a means by which the party communicates to members the degree to which they are in favor or not in favor with the party, which can be incredibly consequential because it can mean the difference between reelection or not.
It’s, it’s the existential political question for these people. So when Schumer votes no personally, that’s him making his own individual calculus. But the fact that other caucus members felt liberated, emboldened, maybe even to vote yes for this says to me that behind the scenes, Schumer said to them, vote however you want to vote or there will be no penalty for you voting yes on this.
Not a penalty. The way that we’ve seen levied against progressives for breaking ranks in the past where they are shut out of the mainstream Democratic Party apparatus. Do your own fundraising, do your own media earning, we are not going to help you. The machine has closed its doors to you, which again can be incredibly damning for a candidate.
So I think there’s a top-level view that says, well, everyone just voted their conscience or voted their politics and that’s the way it goes. And you know, More Democrats agreed it was time to reopen the government than thought it was, you know, we should keep the government closed. But I think what this really speaks to is that Schumer greenlit defections behind the scenes or at the very least didn’t put up the stop sign to defections, which is some which is, I think, just evidence of weak leadership or evidence of politics that are contrary to what he’s saying in public, that he actually, you know, was happy to have the government reopened and just didn’t want to get his hands dirty personally.
You know, it should be noted that the seven Democrats and one independent who voted to reopen the government, none are up for reelection in the next cycle. So these are people who are quite insulated electorally from the consequences. People are not going to remember this fight in 2028 or beyond when people are up for reelection.
So this is a group of fairly well insulated senators. A few probably won’t even run for reelection. They’re probably at the end of their Senate careers. So it’s really important to keep these dynamics in mind, I think.
Richard Eskow: I think that’s a great point because it’s certainly, I certainly wondered we know how the give and take of legislative negotiations work. And I could certainly see a scenario, for example, I’m not saying I know I don’t, but where Schumer wanted the government to reopen, but just said, look, I took a lot of heat in February over the budget bill.
I can’t do that again. I won’t survive it. So, you know, they provide cover for each other in this way. They do a headcount; they make sure they got what they need and then no more. So that’s one possible scenario here. But let’s let me play devil’s advocate for a second, Sam. The one argument that I’ve heard—and this does not absolve Chuck Schumer of his many other missteps—but the one argument that I’ve heard that might make some sense is the one that says, well, okay, Republicans were getting fed up, they were going to go nuclear and, and end the filibuster.
Now, a lot of us wanted Democrats and the filibuster to get things done during Biden, but it’s still there. And now that they’re back in the minority, they don’t want to lose the filibuster or whatever small leverage it gives them. So rather than have that happen, they orchestrated this surrender, in which case, I guess I would get the Logic.
I mean, I would have my challenges. But what do you think of that theory?
Sam Rosenthal: I think it’s entirely possible. I mean, I buy the idea. There was a piece by Corey, Robin and Jacobin the other day advancing this theory. And I think for a long time, so-called sort of moderates in the Senate have seen the filibuster as the ultimate bulwark against the more extreme, again, air quotes, more extreme excesses of their more ideological counterparts on the flanks of the Senate.
And I think that it’s really, really hard to put that cat back in the bag after you’ve, you know, open the, the door to, to killing the filibuster. I think there are a lot of members of the Senate who are really, really squeamish about the idea that that would be broached in this fight.
And it seemed like it was genuinely on the table. I mean, Trump was really putting the pressure on Senate Republicans to do that. I don’t know if they would have caved. I don’t really have a lot of insight to what happens on that side of the aisle. But it seems like if this had continued to grind on and on in these really punitive measures they were taking to punish working people were not successful in, you know, sort of forging a deal, it’s possible that the filibuster would have been next.
And I think that the Republican Party and Democratic Party leaderships are equally interested in keeping the filibuster intact because it helps them to stop those more, quote, radical things from getting through. People like you and I have, of course, clamored for the end of the filibuster in the past to pass progressive legislation.
And so what’s to stop us from doing it in the future if that becomes something we see time and again in the Senate? So I absolutely think that that was a consideration for some of these members.
Richard Eskow: And to be clear not to sound like I’m going soft on Chuck Schumer, even if that were the case, he didn’t communicate that. He didn’t say, look, we’ve gone to the map for you to protect what little health care you have in our crappy system. Of course he wouldn’t say that. But we’ve gone to the map for you and your health care, and now they’re threatening to, however he wants to put it, destroy the traditions of the Senate.
And we’d be able to do even less to protect it from these people. So regret, you know, that’s what I’m talking about when I talk about leadership is somebody that gets out there and says they didn’t let us do it. But, you know, we’re going to be back. We’re going to try to say again and try to save you again.
And when you give us a majority, this. This stuff won’t happen. Where was that?
Sam Rosenthal: Right. And now I think a serious trap for the party that I’m not sure they fully considered is that they will now partially own when these subsidies expire, that this, this would have been formerly completely on the Republican Party’s hands, but it’s muddled now. There are now Democrats who own the responsibility for this.
And this is a real material thing that’s about to happen to millions of Americans. They are not going to be able to afford their health care. They’re going to see their premiums jump in ways that are completely unaffordable, and their families are going to actually, really suffer. And some people, sadly, are going to die because of this.
And this is something that could have been an issue solely owned by the Republicans to the Democrats Great Benefit going into the midterm elections, but instead, now it’s only mostly owned by the Republicans, which is a far less powerful talking point, unfortunately.
Richard Eskow: So let’s close with this. Just a brief minute on a possible post-Schumer Senate. In your piece, you mentioned that Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in the country. Still, I can’t see the Democrats ever letting him take the leadership, but it would be a good choice. You guys are doing a petition, right?
To don’t step down Chuck. Petition, right.
Sam Rosenthal: That’s right. Yeah.
Richard Eskow: See, this is of interest to me for. For a couple reasons, but one of the main reasons you don’t just have squad members like Rashida Tlaib or Democratic socialists like Bernie saying it’s time for Chuck to go. You have somebody like Seth Moulton. And Seth Moulton and Ro Khan is a good, you know, pretty good guy, and he’s calling for it.
But set Bolton came on the scene as a kind of centrist mainstream Democrat. But as public opinion shifts, you see even someone like Seth Moulton in his campaign promising not to take APAC money. So there’s movement in the wind. And so to me, the most effective thing ordinary people, for lack of a.
Sam Rosenthal: Better term.
Richard Eskow: Activists and others can do to advance the evolution of the Senate process is to sign on to something like this. Because I do think that elected officials are aware of petitions just as they’re aware of polls. And I think the petitions get news attention that keeps the story in the cycle doesn’t go away.
I don’t expect harsh disagreement from you on that, but what is your thinking on that?
Sam Rosenthal: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. The Republican Party has changed fundamentally in the last 10 years. It is a radically different party. And the Democratic Party has not changed in the same way, but it is changing by drips and drabs. It’s a more incremental, sort of more painstaking process. But we have a role to play in that change.
Activists have a role to play in that change. And we should push the party left. I mean that. It is our moment. It’s the opportunity to push the party left. Heading into the midterms, heading into the 2028 presidential contest, it’s going to be an open field. It’s time for us again, as it was in 2016 and 2020, to make claims about what we think the future of this country should look like.
What are the policies we want to see adopted? And this is all part of the process. Signing a petition like this, which you can do@rootsaction.org signals we want to shift. We’re ready for a shift. We’re ready for a different politics. Chuck Schumer is representative of a now extinct politics. He’s living in a world that no longer exists.
And so it’s time for a new set of leaders, people who are willing to really combat Trumpism in an honest, serious way where voters, constituents, people in this country can see them fighting back. People are more than anything, they’re hungry to see a real, legitimate challenge to Donald Trump and Trumpism. Whoever can mount that challenge will win the next couple of elections.
If you can convince voters that you’ve got a better idea than Donald Trump, that’s all you need to do. And you can win the next series of elections. But you have to do it convincingly. And Chuck Schumer’s not doing that. So that’s why we encourage folks to sign on to a petition like this.
Richard Eskow: And I guess my last word to the Democratic Party about that would be, don’t make the same mistake you made with Joe Biden and wait till it’s too late.
Sam Rosenthal: That’s right.
Richard Eskow: And so with that, again, the petition is available@rootsaction.org right. And Sam Rosenthal, political director of Roots Action, you can find his article at a number of places, I think progressivehub.net, common Dreams, under the headline, we were right when we said don’t run, Joe. Now we say step down chalk. Thanks for all your great work in this area, as usual, and as always, thanks for coming on the program.
Sam Rosenthal: Thanks so much for having me. Again. Good to see you.
Richard Eskow: We depend on your support here at the zero hour, so please give whatever you can at any of the links you see on your screen. Thanks so much.