'The New Washington': How Schumer's Power Play Led to a Deal With Trump
On Washington
By CARL HULSE SEPT. 9, 2017
WASHINGTON — Almost from the moment Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act collapsed this summer and weary senators fled the capital, Senator Chuck Schumer began calculating how best to take advantage of the persistent Republican struggle to govern.
“Even when I was on vacation with my family in August, I started looking,” said Mr. Schumer, the New Yorker who leads Senate Democrats, as he recounted the buildup to the stunning debt limit deal that Democrats struck with President Trump this past week over the objections of gobsmacked Republicans.
In an interview with the New York Times podcast “The New Washington,” Mr. Schumer said he pursued an approach that would allow the Democrats to assert themselves as the minority party in coming showdowns over funding the government and increasing the debt limit, while denying Mr. Trump money for his border wall and seeking protection for the undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.
“What’s our leverage?” Mr. Schumer said he kept asking himself. “We only had one thing as leverage at that point, which was the debt ceiling.”
From past experience, Mr. Schumer, like other congressional veterans, knew Republicans would have a difficult, if not impossible, task rounding up votes among themselves to increase the government’s borrowing authority because many conservatives simply won’t vote to do so, even at the expense of the nation’s fiscal stability.
“They can’t let the government default because so many of their conservatives won’t vote for it,” Mr. Schumer said.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/09/us/politics/chuck-schumer-new-washington.html
