Year after year, in shutdown fight after shutdown fight, in debt-limit standoff after debt-limit standoff, you could count on this: While Republicans would be bickering and taking potshots at each other, Democratic leaders would stay in lockstep — giving their members a united front to rally behind.
That all exploded in dramatic fashion this week, culminating Friday at a news conference unlike any I have seen in my career covering Congress, where the No. 1 House Democrat repeatedly dodged questions about whether the No. 1 Senate Democrat was fit to lead.
Should Senate Democrats ditch Chuck Schumer? House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, as the kids say, chose violence: “Next question.”
It was the diss heard around the Capitol and in Democratic circles around the country. It marked the end of decades of relative peace atop the Democratic ranks and exposed the friction between two Brooklyn natives who had worked closely together last year to engineer a new presidential ticket. And it sent a worrying signal to their party: In the future, these two leaders won’t necessarily be singing from the same political hymnal.
The stunning breach comes just as President Donald Trump takes a wrecking ball to the federal bureaucracy and pushes the limits of his constitutional powers. And yet the Jeffries-vs-Schumer drama has emerged as the biggest show on Capitol Hill this week — a distraction for Democrats that is yanking the headlines away from Trump’s tough polling and a spiraling stock market.
Ashley Etienne, a former top communications strategist for ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi who has vocally criticized Hill Democrats agitating for a shutdown, told me it amounted to a “complete meltdown” for Democrats.
“Trump had given the party a gift — the economy is tanking, his tariff wars are devastating Americans’ pocketbooks, and the courts are finally checking his authority — yet we’ve found a way to squander it,” she said, “To beat Trump, we need clarity of purpose, discipline and coordination. It’s clear none of that exists right now.”
While the Democratic base will hold Jeffries up as a hero, even some Jeffries fans are privately questioning his approach. Before the news conference, I heard from several former House Democratic leadership aides who were puzzled by Jeffries’ posture.
One, a Democratic strategist with close ties to Pelosi granted anonymity to speak frankly, texted me out of the blue to say that he’s “afraid Jeffries is letting the Caucus’ emotional response get the best of him and his relationship with his home state counterpart.”
“Sure we’ve had disagreements in the past … but I cannot recall a moment when our bicameral leadership went this hard against each other,” the person added.
So how did two Democrats of different generations but similar politics and a shared Brooklyn upbringing end up so dramatically at odds?
Many of the Democrats I heard from said it was a long time coming and represented a deeper divide between the two leaders that had been obscured during the hothouse of the 2024 campaign.
“Leader Schumer sees Leader Jeffries as a new leader who needs to learn a lot about the nuances of governing and negotiating,” said the Pelosi-linked strategist. “Jeffries sees Schumer as someone who has lost touch with the sentiment of the base and whose tactics and style are a relic of the past.”
Yes, the clash was exacerbated by the different political realities that the two men were inhabiting. With House Republicans able to put up the votes to fund the government, Jeffries didn’t have to make the hard choice about whether he was leading his members into a shutdown. He could instead use the moment to ingratiate himself with the base, and he did.
Schumer, on the other hand, was the last man standing between the lights being shut off and 2 million federal workers being furloughed without pay. Further compounding the dilemma: real fears that Trump and Elon Musk would have even more power in a shutdown than they would otherwise.
Typically in situations like this, leaders graciously give each other space to do what they need to do — even if they privately disagree. Case in point: Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have vastly different ideas about the size and scope and strategy for Trump’s agenda — and yet we have not seen them spar publicly.
It’s not a difficult line to walk. Here’s Sen. Mark Warner managing to do it just fine: “I’m a ‘no’ on this — but I have total respect for members who are voting yes, because these were both crappy choices,” the Virginia Democrat said after announcing his opposition to the House GOP bill.
That’s not what happened here, however.
Jeffries and his leadership team worked over the course of days to stir up opposition to the House bill even after it passed, loading pressure on Senate Democrats even as many in the party knew they would eventually have to swallow it.
And all came to a head with Jeffries’ curious choice to return to the Capitol for a news conference Friday, after two days holed up with his caucus at a suburban Virginia resort, knowing full well he would be inundated with questions about Schumer — with pat answers at the ready except to indirectly accuse his Senate counterpart of posing a “false choice” between shutdown and surrender.
Jeffries’ comments at the presser, some House Democrats speculate, were the results of a pressure campaign that had been building at the Democratic retreat. As they huddled in Leesburg, members complained to Jeffries about Schumer throwing in the towel. They felt like they had gone out on a limb to vote against government funding, and they felt Schumer was being weak in refusing to follow suit.
Jeffries also felt blindsided by Schumer’s decision, according to someone close to him. While Schumer gave Jeffries a heads up that he would back the GOP’s funding bill just before announcing his intentions publicly, Jeffries had believed for days that Schumer would likely come down on his side on the vote.
Jeffries’ leadership team first put out a joint statement Thursday hours after Schumer announced his decision, in which they said they would “not be complicit” in advancing the funding bill.
Meanwhile, Jeffries privately argued to his members that they were in the right, invoking the words of Martin Luther King Jr., no less: “The time is always right to do what’s right. This week, House Democrats did what was right. We stood up against Donald Trump,” he said at the retreat, according to my colleague Nicholas Wu.
A person close with Jeffries told me he did not mean to cast aspersions on Schumer’s leadership during the press conference, but was dodging the questions to try to keep the focus on Republicans.
Tell that to Schumer. Now with Jeffries keeping mum on Schumer’s future as Senate Democratic leader, he has essentially given Democrats a green light to question whether he should stay at all.
The dynamic is a major break from the relationship Pelosi and Schumer had back in the day. One of the former leadership aides said those two would have been bending each other’s ears daily to strategize — and certainly never would have let their disagreement spill out into the open.
“I don’t know that Pelosi would have ever gotten into an open confrontation with the Senate like this,” said a senior House aide.
The most surprising part of it, these people told me, is that Jeffries pounced even after Schumer explained that he was trying to do what he believed was right — taking the hard position on behalf of what’s best for the party despite knowing he’d take heat from the base.
“This is the [Mitch] McConnell thing, right?” the former House leadership aide said. “He would take the shit and eat the sandwich — and that’s what you do when you are leader. Pelosi did it, too. These guys [in the House], they don’t have the same experience.”
So why create all this chaos for his counterpart across the Rotunda? The immediate political incentives for Jeffries were clear: He was already getting pummeled by the base for the tepid response from Washington Democrats to Trump and Musk’s slash-and-burn campaign. Given the opportunity to reverse that narrative, he took it.
“Look, it takes a lot of heat off our leadership,” said one senior House Democratic aide when asked about why Jeffries was doing this.
Another senior House Democratic aide told my colleague Nick that the situation allowed front-line Democrats to keep the base happy while someone else took out the trash.
But it may have come at the cost of upending the lockstep relationship between leaders that has historically been essential to parties out of power. The usual pattern in Washington is that nothing unites a party quite like being in the minority — witness Kevin McCarthy’s marriage of convenience to the hard-liner Jim Jordan, who once blocked him from the gavel.
The breakup also underscores the continuing divide in the Democratic Party over how to oppose Trump.
A longtime former House Democratic leadership aide, who was also granted anonymity to speak frankly, called it evidence of “the lack of experience by House leaders.” The aide warned that this could have long-term repercussions.
“The cool sexy thing is, ‘fight, fight, fight.’ … But it’s one thing to gin up pressure on [Sens. Kyrsten] Sinema and [Joe] Manchin,” the person said, referring to the retired Senate moderates. “This is different. …This is gonna be terrible for their relationship.”
