Last night, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer visited “All In With Chris Hayes” on MSNBC and said that he does not think democracy is at stake yet from the Trump administration’s actions, and that he will wait for President Trump to defy the Supreme Court and for a massive popular uprising to take place before taking any stronger actions.
Schumer’s appearance was a return to the show after a remote interview last Thursday, on the heels of leading a group of Senate Democrats to vote for cloture on the Republicans’ six-month continuing resolution on government funding. It was a chance for him to expand on his reasoning in the fraught political moment of the second Trump administration.
Pressed by Hayes on the argument that the nation is now undergoing a constitutional crisis under President Trump, Schumer said that "our democracy will be at stake" if Trump disobeys a Supreme Court ruling, but "we're not there."
Schumer is essentially ceding Congress' oversight powers, until Trump defies further court orders or a possible Supreme Court ruling. Schumer placing a red line at the Trump administration flouting Justice John Roberts’ high court, as opposed to breaking laws passed by Congress, is a strange position for the highest-ranking elected member of the opposition party and a member of Congress since 1980. If Trump disobeying the unelected Supreme Court is the ultimate decider of a constitutional crisis, what role in checking executive power does that leave for Congress, much less a minority party?
In his first 100 days, Trump has signed executive orders and taken other actions that disregard congressional appropriations and the operations of independent federal agencies. Law professors including Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, have pointed to a laundry list of illegal actions taken by Trump: attempting to undo birthright citizenship, shutting down federal agencies, firing government employees without process under civil service protections, and more. Recently, the Trump administration ignored an order from a federal judge to halt deportations of a group of Venezuelan men, asserting its ability to detain and remove people without due process.
