Jeffries And Schumer Insist, Separately, They Are Together

NEW YORK — The two top Democratic leaders in Congress are making nice and trying to move on after their remarkable blowup last week.

In separate public appearances on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries insisted they are aligned on fighting President Donald Trump and the Republican legislative agenda — focusing particularly on the GOP’s plans for a sweeping domestic policy bill that they both warned will require cuts to Americans’ health care.

Jeffries, speaking at a central Brooklyn hospital with Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), health care providers and Medicaid recipients, said he and Schumer on Sunday “had a good conversation about the path forward particularly as it relates to making sure we all speak with one voice.”

Pressed multiple times if he supports Schumer’s leadership, Jeffries said, “Yes, I do.”

Schumer, meanwhile, said in a pair of national TV broadcasts that he had no plans to step down as the Democratic leader in the Senate and insisted he and Jeffries would move in lockstep after last week’s stunning breach over a GOP-written spending bill.

“We're moving forward — Hakeem and I have a plan,” Schumer said during a “CBS Mornings” interview. “There's a real contrast between the parties. The Republican party, now particularly in office, is the party of rich oligarchs who want to really screw every average American so they can get tax cuts for the rich, and we are fighting that every day.”

The efforts by the two New Yorkers to get in sync appeared calibrated to put an end to a long weekend full of recriminations over Schumer’s decision to allow the Republican funding bill through, averting a potential government shutdown — after Jeffries had led his own caucus in strongly opposing it.

The clash was further heightened when Jeffries, at a Friday news conference at the Capitol, sidestepped a question about Schumer’s leadership. That only fueled more fury directed at Schumer from all corners of the party — with one activist group in his home state saying its members wanted his “head on a pike” over the capitulation.

Schumer defended his decision at length in his TV appearances Tuesday, warning that a shutdown would have greatly empowered Trump and his ally Elon Musk to accelerate their efforts to fire federal workers and gut agencies. Describing the choice between the GOP bill and a shutdown on ABC’s “The View,” he said, “One chops off one of your fingers, the other chops off your arm.”

“No one wants to fight more than me, and no one fights more than me,” Schumer said. “You’ve got to fight smart.”

The public appearances Tuesday came after the two men issued a joint statement marking a “Medicaid Day of Action,” organized by congressional Democrats, meant to highlight potential cuts to the federal health care program that could be undertaken under a budget framework recently approved by House Republicans.

“We are in this fight until we win this fight,” they said.

But while Jeffries and Schumer met in person on Sunday night in Brooklyn, according to a person granted anonymity to discuss the private conversation, they did not appear together in public Tuesday, even though both men were in New York City.

Asked why he was not with Schumer, Jeffries said, “I assume that he’s participating in other engagements throughout the state, but Senate Democrats have been very clear they’re partnering with House Democrats to stop these cuts from ever taking effect.”

And neither leader backed away from his own approach to handling the funding saga. Schumer continued to insist a shutdown “would have been the greatest disaster … to put the government in the sole hands of evil, nasty, nihilistic people” like Trump and Musk.

“So I thought I did the thing a leader should do,” he said. “Even when people don't see the danger around the curve, my job was to alert people to it and I knew I'd get some bullets.”

Jeffries, meanwhile, stood by his decision to rally his members in opposition, even when asked if he could see Schumer’s logic in reaching a different conclusion.

“As House Democrats, we stand by our decision to oppose the Republican spending bill, because the partisan Republican spending bill, that was not negotiated with Democrats,” he said.