Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, defended himself on Friday in the face of a Democratic backlash to his decision to vote with Republicans for a stopgap spending bill to stave off a government shutdown, saying he was willing to take political hits to protect his members and their constituents from a longer-term disaster.
On a day of white-hot anger among many Democratic lawmakers and activists, some of whom gathered outside of Mr. Schumer’s Brooklyn home to protest his decision to shrink from a shutdown fight, the five-term senator shrugged off the prospect of a primary challenge that could cost him his job and said he was doing the right thing.
“There is no off-ramp,” for a government shutdown, Mr. Schumer said in an interview Friday from his office just off the Senate floor. “The off-ramp is in the hands of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and DOGE. We could be in a shutdown for six months or nine months.”
He sees his job as leader as taking the long view and trying to avoid that outcome, which would lead to Democrats being “far more accosted” by angry constituents and activists than they are at the moment.
So, for now, Mr. Schumer said, “I’ll take some of the bullets.”
The criticism was flying at him fast and furious on Friday.
House Democrats, including some of the party’s most senior members, and progressive activists characterized Mr. Schumer’s stance on the spending measure as a shameful capitulation to Mr. Trump and the G.O.P.
The grass roots Democratic group Pass the Torch, which agitated for former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to end his campaign last summer, on Friday morning called on the Senate minority leader to step aside.
“Chuck Schumer is unwilling and unable to meet the moment,” the group said in a statement. “His sole job is to fight MAGA’s fascist takeover of our democracy — instead, he’s directly enabling it.”
The call came the day after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, declined to rule out mounting a primary challenge against Mr. Schumer, telling CNN there was “a deep sense of outrage and betrayal” about his decision on the pending bill.
(Mr. Schumer brushed aside the notion in the interview, saying, “It’s four years away,” and adding that his focus was on the fight in front of him and winning back the majority in 2026.)
Earlier, Mr. Trump weighed in with a political kiss of death for Mr. Schumer, congratulating him for “doing the right thing.”
“A non pass would be a Country destroyer, approval will lead us to new heights,” he wrote on social media. “Again, really good and smart move by Senator Schumer.”
Many of his colleagues conceded privately on Friday that Mr. Schumer was doing the job of a leader: protecting his members from damaging votes and shouldering the blame for difficult decisions.
In the interview, Mr. Schumer said that his two-step on the spending measure — he came out in opposition on Wednesday, only to backtrack on Thursday and say he would allow it to move — was a negotiating tactic aimed at giving Democrats maximum leverage in their fight against the legislation.
“Our job was to help Hakeem make sure the bill didn’t pass,” he said, referring to Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader. But House Republicans held together behind the temporary spending plan, pushing it through over Democratic opposition and putting the onus on Democrats in the Senate to either accept it or be blamed for a shutdown.
Faced with the choice, Mr. Schumer said he had determined that a fight over funding the government would only muddle the much bigger fight Democrats were undertaking: pushing back against Mr. Trump’s plan to enact tax cuts for billionaires, financed by spending cuts impacting the middle class.
“That’s far more effective than arguing back and forth who’s the cause of a shutdown,” Mr. Schumer said, adding: “My internal gyroscope tells me I’m right.”
But at a moment when liberal activists and Democrats are desperate for party leaders to stand in opposition to Mr. Trump, the backlash has been intense.
Even former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Mr. Schumer’s onetime partner in leadership, suggested that he had made the wrong call. She issued a scalding statement on Friday that did not name Mr. Schumer but said that Mr. Trump and Elon Musk had set up a “false choice” between a government shutdown or a blank check to make devastating cuts across the board — and lamented that some Democrats had fallen into their trap.
“This false choice that some are buying instead of fighting is unacceptable,” she said. “I salute Leader Hakeem Jeffries for his courageous rejection of this false choice, and I am proud of my colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus for their overwhelming vote against this bill.”
House Democratic leaders have been on a victory tour since Monday, when they succeeded in keeping their members almost completely united in opposing the funding bill. In doing so, they amped up the pressure on Senate Democrats to do the same.
“I don’t know why anyone would support that bill,” said Representative Pete Aguilar of California, the No. 3 House Democrat. “Elon Musk and Donald Trump are systematically already shutting down the federal government. Why we would want any part of that, I have no idea.”
On Friday, asked at a news conference whether it was time for new leadership in the Senate, Mr. Jeffries said curtly: “Next question.”
Representative Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat who has carved out a lane for himself as a pragmatic progressive, said he worried that Mr. Schumer had made a strategic miscalculation that the party writ large would live to regret. The funding bill, he said, “represents the best (and possibly only) leverage that we as Democrats will have to prevent Donald Trump’s systematic decimation of the social safety net.”
But their vote in the House was an easy one: With Republicans united by Mr. Trump to back the bill, Democrats did not have the votes to stop it in the chamber. In the Senate, where at least eight Democrats would have to vote with all Republicans to clear a filibuster, the picture was more complicated.
Within the Senate Democratic Caucus, members recognized that and were unwilling to criticize Mr. Schumer. Some even privately praised him for allowing members to vote “no” while privately hoping that the bill would pass.
Some of them agreed with Mr. Schumer’s argument that a shutdown would give the Trump administration more authority to deem entire agencies and programs “nonessential,” and never bring them back or rehire staff after a furlough. In the interview, Mr. Schumer used food stamps as an example. “The day after the shutdown, they can say all of SNAP is not essential, we’re not funding it,” he said. “In a shutdown, it is solely the executive branch that determines what is essential and what is nonessential. There is no court check.”
Some members expressed confusion about why a government shutdown in March, just weeks into the new administration, had suddenly become some sort of defining Neville Chamberlain moment for the leader of the Senate Democrats.
“Did we have leverage?” said Senator John Hickenlooper, Democrat of Colorado, who said he planned to oppose a bill that he described as a blatant power grab by the G.O.P. “We had two horrendous choices.”
“Chuck Schumer is in a very, very difficult spot,” Mr. Hickenlooper added. “He made a real, hard decision. His supporters in New York are a big part of the base, as well. He knew how he was going to get attacked and he still made the decision. He deserves my respect.”
Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the top Democrat on the Appropriations committee, however, was stunned by Mr. Schumer’s reversal and continued to vociferously oppose the bill, known as a continuing resolution or “C.R.”
“In this case,” she said Friday on the Senate floor, “C.R. stands for ‘complete resignation.’”
