Copyright Newsweek
The knives are out again. Washington is performing its shutdown morality play and Chuck Schumer is the villain of the week. He can’t expect to escape judgment for that. But also judge him on his judges. Following the last holiday-season cliffhanger—a funding lapse that lasted all of 38 minutes in December 2024—Schumer’s Senate sealed Biden’s 235th lifetime judge. The government wobbled; the bench did not. That completed a four-year run that left roughly a quarter of all active federal judges carrying the Biden imprint—an outcome that will shape American law long after the current shutdown’s headlines expire. Common Knowledge The left’s revolt this time round has been loud and personal. "Leadership is about changing and adapting when there is real need," first-term Senator Elissa Slotkin said, warning Democrats would "fail to meet the moment" otherwise. Representative Ro Khanna went further: "Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced." California Governor Gavin Newsom called the compromise "surrender." Senator Jeff Merkley labeled the Senate vote a "brutal blow." Not all Democrats agree. Asked if Schumer should stay in charge, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries answered "yes" and said that Senate Democrats "waged a valiant fight…defeating the partisan Republican spending bill 14 or 15 different times." Senator Dick Durbin added that, even as they disagreed on the final move, Schumer "was a gentleman about it." The right, for its part, is savoring the spectacle. Donald Trump told Fox News that Schumer "thought he could break the Republicans, and the Republicans broke him," casting the Democrat as overmatched and off-balance. Uncommon Knowledge The latest shutdown melodrama may have missed a vital point about Schumer’s tenure. His singular achievement is a judiciary built at speed and scale. Two hundred thirty-five confirmations (or 228 "unique" judges), capped in December 2024, now account for about 27 percent of the active Article III bench—assembled through two years of a 50–50 Senate and an unforgiving floor calendar. That’s a metric that endures, and it’s one way of measuring his leadership, whichever side you support. The remarkable part isn’t just scale; it’s speed. In 2021–22, the median time from nomination to confirmation was about 121 days for circuit and 139 days for district nominees—swifter than many recent Congresses for district nominees. The machinery was rebuilt across years: Democrats’ 2013 "nuclear option" lowered cloture to a simple majority for lower courts; Republicans extended that to Supreme Court nominees in 2017; and in 2019 the Senate cut post-cloture debate on district judges from 30 hours to 2, freeing precious floor time. Schumer’s "judge machine" ran on those rails. That’s why the December 2024 episode matters as a parable. While securing a stopgap minutes past midnight, Senate leaders also finished the confirmation sprint—illustrating how the same commodity (floor time) resolves both crises and careers. The judicial milestone—Schumer’s caucus confirming Biden’s 235th—landed the same weekend. Schumer’s record isn’t just robes. With narrow margins he steered the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; the CHIPS and Science Act with $52.7 billion in semiconductor incentives; the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the most significant federal gun-safety law in nearly 30 years; and the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy credits, which CBO now pegs at roughly $825 billion over a decade under an updated budget window. Of course, these measures are also fuel for his opponents on the right, even as they were lauded by the left. The paradox of Schumer’s week is that both narratives about him this week are true. The current shutdown has put him on the back foot, with critics shouting louder than his defenders. But the previous shutdown melodrama—December 2024—was the setting for his most durable win: locking in a quarter of the active federal bench. If legacies are judged by what lasts, Schumer’s is seated for life.
