Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer: a key relationship to a successful presidency
In the final hours ahead of the vote on Joe Biden’s Covid relief bill, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia had thrown his fellow Democrats a curveball. He had effectively put the entire bill in jeopardy by possibly joining Republicans on unemployment benefits.
Manchin seemed immovable. The White House legislative affairs teamcouldn’tget him to relent. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Democrat in the chamber, met with him as well, but couldn’t get him to budge, according to two Democrats with knowledge of those discussions. Eventually Manchin and Biden got on the phone directly, twice. The unemployment benefits in the bill were scaled back by a few weeks and the bill regained momentum.
The episode underscores an important dynamic between Schumer and Biden. For decades, the two Democrats have been striving to get the jobs they now have -Schumer as the Senate majority leader under a Democratic president, and Biden the president with his party in control of both chambers of Congress.
But now the two Democrats have to wrangle with a sometimes unruly and razor-thin Democratic majority in Congress amid an ongoing global pandemic and a teetering economy. For Biden, successfully accomplishing his policy goals depends on close coordination with Schumer. For Schumer, working with Biden and ushering through his agenda could decide the length of time he is majority leader or even if he has to worry about a primary challenge from the left.
While Biden and Schumer have run in very powerful Democratic circles and served as second-in-command to party leaders who fostered strong relationships, their history together is comparatively thin for two Democrats who have been in national politics for decades. They have a good relationship, but they aren’t besties.
“Look, are they bosom buddies? No,” said a former Obama administration official. “But is there like a great deal of respect and fondness for one another? Yes. They’re pretty different people but I think they’re mutually fans of each other. This is not a situation where their kids hang out or they go to family barbecues.”
Biden, 78, and Schumer, 71, are Democratic party mainstays. Both are known for their love of retail politicking and talking. Both come from comparatively humble beginnings. Both of them have spent decades in the Senate. And both of them have sometimes aligned more closely with the more moderate wing of the Democratic party and at other times the more liberal wing.
But for all their similarities there are plenty of differences as well. Schumer graduated from Harvard University. Biden went first to the University of Delaware and then Syracuse University College of Law. Schumer came through the House of Representatives to the Senate. Biden was a member of the New Castle county council before being elected to the upper chamber.
During their time in the Senate, Biden became chair of two prestigious committees. Schumer distinguished himself through stints as chairman of Senate Democrats’ campaign arms and, in his earliest days, pushing Democrats not to hold back on opposing Bush administration judicial nominees.
Perhaps most important, though, Biden’s ambitions always transcended the Senate. Schumer’s less so. There were moments where speculation grew that Schumer could be a dark horse presidential candidate but he has always stamped that out quickly.
“I’m not going to be president. I’m happy being senator,” Schumer told Charlie Rose in an interview in 2007. When pressed, Schumer reiterated, saying “What’s next? You know what my job is now? To have our Democratic majority in the Senate. I’m part of the leadership … I love what I’m doing. And if you do it well, everything is going to work out all right.”
Ideological or political dustups between the two Democrats have been rare but they have happened. One exception was circa 1999 when Biden was hoping to move legislation that
would have made it harder to declare bankruptcy. Schumer wanted to include an amendment that would have made it harder for anti-abortion protesters to not have to pay court fines by declaring bankruptcy. Biden wasn’t vocally opposed to the amendment, despite at times espousing anti-abortion positions based on his Catholic faith. In the end, the amendment did not make it into the final version of the bill and Biden joined with over a dozen Democrats and Republicans to pass the bill. President Bill Clinton ended up vetoing it.
More timely to the brewing debates of today are Biden and Schumer’s thoughts on the filibuster. When Schumer
was a new entrant to the Senate and loudly urging his colleagues to use whatever mechanisms available to block judicial nominees picked by President George W Bush that Democrats felt were too extreme. This included opposition research which Schumer’s staff shared with reporters and fellow Democratic senators. In a 2003 New York Times article, Biden praised Schumer’s tactics concerning Miguel Estrada, a Bush nominee for the court of appeals for the circuit court of Washington DC, for hitting a nerve with conservatives.
“There are some senators who have the same views Chuck has,” Biden said according to the Times. ‘‘But conservatives don’t worry about them because they’re not effective.”
But Biden ended up missing a key vote on Estrada’s nomination, which eventually was withdrawn.
At other moments, though, both Schumer and Biden have been wary about the effectiveness about filibustering nominees in vain. In a 2006 Chicago Sun-Times story about Democratic opposition to the supreme court nominee Samuel Alito, who would eventually join the court, Biden is described as joining with Schumer and the then Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, in reluctantly fighting Alito with a filibuster.
“I think a filibuster makes sense when you have a prospect of actually succeeding,” Biden said at the time.
Now, the two leaders are under growing pressure to support major changes to the filibuster or gut it altogether. Biden has refrained from supporting such reforms and there still aren’t enough votes in the Democratic caucus to push Schumer to change the obstruction tool either.
Biden and Schumer talk regularly, according to aides, and have been in close contact during passage of Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief deal. Schumer has advertised his relationship with Biden, posting an Instagram video of him talking to Biden when news outlets reported that Biden had officially won the 2020 presidential election.
But interviews with a dozen Democrats, as well as other top party officials, say most of Biden and Schumer’s interactions have been in the capacity of being high-ranking officials in the room with higher-ranking officials – such as during the Obama administration when Biden was vice-president and Schumer was the third ranking Democrat in the chamber.
On Friday during a speech hailing passage of Biden’s relief bill, the president made a point to praise Schumer’s work in moving the legislation through the Senate.
“But all kidding aside, we’ve still got a lot of great majority leaders,” Biden said, speaking in front of Schumer and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. “But I never saw anybody handle such a controversial, consequential piece of legislation that was right on the edge, than Chuck Schumer. I owe you, Chuck. You did an incredible job.”