On Wednesday’s PBS NewsHour, co-host Geoff Bennett conducted a 13-minute interview with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and it was challenging – from the Left.
PBS began with a video medley of Democrat leaders from Nancy Pelosi to Gov. Josh Shapiro expressing their fury at Schumer for voting in favor of a continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown.
The headline for the interview summarized the tilt of the interview:
‘We had an awful choice’: Schumer defends voting with GOP saying shutdown would be worse
Bennett, a former MSNBC correspondent, came at Schumer with attitude:
I know that you maintain that a shutdown would have been far worse than passing the Republican bill. What do you see that the vast majority of Hill Democrats don't see? Why are they wrong in saying that you should have blocked?...
But when you hear the governor of Pennsylvania say that you squandered your leverage, or Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi saying that you gave up the votes and got nothing in return, how does that strike you?...
There are Democrats who say that, if the government had shut down, you force Republicans to own it. All the pain that Americans would feel that you just described, Republicans would pay the political price. Why not be as tactically ruthless as Republicans have shown themselves to be?
In theory, PBS would be expected to be a moderator between Democrats and Republicans in policy disputes. But in reality, they demand Democrats be "tactically ruthless."
Bennett didn't offer a scintilla of pushback as Schumer claimed you can't go into a shutdown because its duration is "totally up to those evil people who hate the federal government, who hate all the good things that we have been able to do. One of the Republican senators told the Democratic Senator, if you go to shutdown, we will be in it for six, nine months until we destroy the federal government." Is that an actual quote?
Bennett did offer one question imagining how the ardent Democrats (and their ardent media allies) have failed:
Channeling what I would imagine would be some of the pushback from the Democratic base, it would be that naming and shaming with Donald Trump doesn't work. That's what Democrats have done for the past two years. In this last election, he won the popular vote, the Electoral College, every battleground state. So the rules of political gravity, press conferences and bold statements and coordinated tweets, it doesn't work. I mean, what does the fight look like in 2025?
Then the questions became easier for Schumer, like this anti-Trump softball: "There are those who believe that we are in real time living through an assault on the constitutional order. Do you believe that we are in a constitutional crisis right now?
Schumer replied: "Yes, our democracy is at risk because Donald Trump shows that he wishes to violate the laws in many, many different ways."
When Bennett turned to the original reason for the interview, Schumer's book on anti-Semitism, he did ask Schumer to explain what he wanted to say to anti-Semites on the Left. Then he turned back to Trump: "In the Oval Office days ago, President Trump condemned you, saying that you aren't Jewish anymore. He called you a Palestinian, using that word as an insult."
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