The Washington Post has a good, detailed summary of the apoplectic rage that some Democrats feel for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer right now, how lots of Democrats see those who voted to reopen the government as traitors, and how many in the party feel their leaders still aren’t standing up to President Trump.
But there’s one thing missing from the article: any sense of which Democratic senator would replace Schumer as minority leader. That’s not a reporting error; right now there just isn’t anyone in the caucus who is publicly expressing a desire to replace Schumer as leader. If progressives want to replace Schumer, they need to convince some Senate Democrat to challenge the soon-to-be-75-year-old New York Democrat.
Now, you may think that Senate Democrats are dumb, but they’re smart enough to know that it’s a bad idea to get rid of their leader without having someone else in mind to replace him. You may recall that in October 2023, under the brilliant leadership of that moral paragon Matt Gaetz, House Republicans ditched Kevin McCarthy as speaker without having anyone in mind to replace him. After about three weeks of leaderless chaos — during which Hamas attacked Israel — House Republicans finally unified behind Mike Johnson.
The lesson of that debacle is that if you want to get rid of your party’s current leader, you should unify behind an alternative before you get rid of the current guy.