Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is done with being the Charlie Brown to the GOP’s Lucy and their football.
“No,” Schumer replied bluntly on Tuesday night when CNN asked if more could’ve been done to bring Republican senators like Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) on board with Democrats’ sweeping $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, which they passed in the Senate without any GOP support on Saturday.
Schumer pointed to his party’s ultimately futile efforts to appease Republicans on the stimulus package when the recession hit over a decade ago.
“We made a big mistake in 2009 and ’10. Susan Collins was part of that mistake,” he said. “We cut back on the stimulus dramatically and we stayed in recession for five years.”
The Democratic leader asserted that the watered-down COVID-19 proposal Collins and nine other Republican senators had offered as a “compromise” was “so far away from what’s needed, so far away from what [President Joe Biden] proposed, that he thought that they were not being serious in wanting to really negotiate.”
Schumer said he has “hope” that “now that Republicans have seen” what Democrats can do without their support, “they’ll realize they ought to try to work with us.”
However, he emphasized again that Democrats are “not going to make the mistake” of relying on the other side’s support for a massive rescue package like before.
Schumer’s remarks underscore his party’s determination to circumvent the GOP obstructionism that ran rampant during the Obama years, which also crippled Democrats’ push for healthcare reform until they managed to pass the Affordable Care Act.
Watch Schumer below:
Schumer on whether Dems should've tried harder to win over GOPers like Collins for COVID package: "No. We made a big mistake in 2009 and '10. Susan Collins was part of that mistake." pic.twitter.com/8kgeaOnbRr
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) March 10, 2021
