Meet Chuck Schumer

 Chuck Schumer  gets a 90% rating from Americans for Democratic Action, a conventional liberal group and a 80% liberal rating from the National Journal.

Daily Beast - Schumer’s leadership political action committee, known as “IMPACT,” doled out almost $1.5 million from 2010 through 2014, according to data gleaned from the Federal Election Commission by the Center for Public Integrity. The total includes at least $720,000 donated to Senate Democrats. Durbin’s Prairie PAC gave away $1.3 million from 2010 through 2014, with at least $675,000 going to Senate Democrats.

Leadership PACs are political committees used by members of Congress to win friends and influence people. They have in the past been criticized as legal slush funds.

But the real difference is in party committee giving. During the same time period, Schumer, via his campaign committee and leadership PAC, gave $5.1 million to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee more than twice the $2.2 million handed out by Durbin.

Leadership PACs are political committees used by members of Congress to win friends and influence people. They have in the past been criticized as legal slush funds, used for all manner of expenses. “It’s just unimaginable that anyone would even have a hope of running for Senate leader without having been an active giver,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center. “You wouldn’t even have a chance in hell of winning.”

NY Times, 2008 - As the financial crisis jolted the nation in September, Senator Charles E. Schumer was consumed. He traded telephone calls with bankers, then became one of the first officials to promote a Wall Street bailout. He spent hours in closed-door briefings and a weekend helping Congressional leaders nail down details of the $700 billion rescue package.

The next day, Mr. Schumer appeared at a breakfast fund-raiser in Midtown Manhattan for Senate Democrats. Addressing Henry R. Kravis, the buyout billionaire, and about 20 other finance industry executives, he warned that a bailout would be a hard sell on Capitol Hill. Then he offered some reassurance: The businessmen could count on the Democrats to help steer the nation through the financial turmoil.

“We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals,” one executive said, summarizing Mr. Schumer’s remarks. “We are going to be effective, moderate advocates for sound economic policies, good responsible stewards you can trust.”

The message clearly resonated. The next week, executives at firms represented at the breakfast sent in more than $135,000 in campaign donations. Senator Schumer plays an unrivaled role in Washington as beneficiary, advocate and overseer of an industry that is his hometown’s most important business.

Washington Post, 1998 - He is the son of a Brooklyn exterminator, the smartest kid in his Flatbush high school, a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law, a state assemblyman at age 23 and a congressman from Brooklyn since he was 29.

Now 47 and having never lost an election, Schumer is a center-left Democrat who disagrees with Republican D'Amato on virtually everything. Yet when it comes to the tactics that win elections, Schumer and D'Amato drink from the same assassin's cup.

Like D'Amato, Schumer is an infamous publicity hound. Bob Dole once said the shortest distance in Washington is the gap between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera. Democratic members of the New York House delegation, having watched the Brooklyn congressman hog press attention for 18 years, cheered among themselves when Schumer declared he was running for the Senate. ...

[And] Like D'Amato, Schumer specializes in going where the money is – Wall Street – and relentlessly importuning financiers until they open their wallets. With D'Amato's $22 million and Schumer's $12.5 million, much of it raised from the same big brokerage firms, they are on course to make the New York Senate race the most expensive in the nation. ...

Zaid Jilani, Alternet - His behavior has changed very little since the [bank] crisis. When Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Ted Kaufman (D-DE) introduced an amendment to break up the largest banks, they were able to recruit the support of a handful of GOP senators, but Schumer worked alongside the Obama administration to kill it. He insists that capital gains tax rates stay lower than those of other income, a direct gift to fund managers. And he has kept alive the idea of granting corporations that store cash overseas to bring funds back to the United States if they are granted a large tax cut.

All of these moves point to interest groups, not ideology. He maintains consistently high ratings from various liberal ideological groups, and is reliable with respect to issues like womens rights and gay rights. But his positions related to the banks are in sync with the fact that he comes from a state that is dominated by the industry – in 2014, roughly 19 percent of the state's total revenue came from Lower Manhattan, the geographic epicenter of Wall Street...

“Every time the Arab world, the Palestinians, have risen against us, we have risen to defeat them. The one existential threat to Israel’s existence is a nuclear Iran,” thundered a speaker before a right-wing Jewish audience in the fall of 2013. It'd be easy to believe those words came from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose campaign of incitement earned even a rare rebuke from the United States. But those words were not spoken by any Israeli, rather they were remarks Schumer gave to the OHEL Children's Home and Family Services gala, as he was trying to rally Democrats to oppose a nuclear deal that President Obama was in the process of working out with Iran.

His rhetoric on matters particularly relating to Israel has often been among Congress's most extreme.... It isn't just Schumer's words that are warlike. He was a backer of the war in Iraq, and he has been “leading the push” for deal-busting sanctions in the year and a half that Obama has been negotiating with Iran. His latest move is to co-sponsor legislation drafted by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) that would require congressional approval of any Iran deal, which would be a hard-sell in the current far-right Congress.

Like with Wall Street, Schumer's foreign policy orientation is fueled by cash – he is among the largest recipients of pro-Israel donations of any member of Congress, Democrat or Republican.




Juan Cole, 2014 - Back in March, we pointed out that Senator Chuck Schumer had more or less admitted that his attempt at a media shield law (protecting sources) likely wouldn't protect Glenn Greenwald




Washington Post, 2014 - The Internal Revenue Service would be required to turn over millions of unpaid tax bills to private debt collectors under a measure before the Senate, reviving a program that has previously led to complaints of harassment and has not saved taxpayers money. The provision was tucked into a larger bill, aimed at renewing an array of expired tax breaks, at the request of Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), whose state is home to two of the four private collection agencies that stand to benefit from the proposal.



Washington Post - The Internal Revenue Service would be required to turn over millions of unpaid tax bills to private debt collectors under a measure before the Senate, reviving a program that has previously led to complaints of harassment and has not saved taxpayers money. The provision was tucked into a larger bill, aimed at renewing an array of expired tax breaks, at the request of Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), whose state is home to two of the four private collection agencies that stand to benefit from the proposal.




Washington Post, 2010 - [Senator] Lincoln was embraced by her colleagues on the Senate floor as a conquering general returning from war. Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.), in charge of the Senate Democrats' campaign effort, gave her a hug and a kiss and said, "Now we just have to raise money." Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) held up two fists and said of her primary campaign: "Fighting Wall Street with one hand, unions with the other."

Open Secrets, 2014 - The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, first passed in the aftermath of 9/11 to relieve insurers of deep losses in connection with terrorist acts, was reauthorized easily in the Senate. The extremely deep pockets of industries that lobbied aggressively for the bill might have had something to do with that... The securities and investment, real estate or insurance industry, or more than one of those, ranks among the top three campaign donors so far this cycle for each of the nine senators who were first to attach their names to the bill.

The bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), with strong ties to Wall Street, was also a cosponsor of the original 2002 bill, at the time backed by five other senators, including fellow New York Democrat Hillary Clinton. That year, Schumer was the top recipient of campaign funds from the finance, insurance and real estate sector, which gave him $3.1 million. This time around, he’s received close to $1 million from that sector.

The program requires insurers to offer terrorism risk insurance policies in return for backstopping the insurance companies in the event of heavy losses, such as occurred on Sept. 11, 2001. Any insured losses over a given threshold would be covered by the government.

Lloyd Grove, Daily Beast, 2010 - The strange case of Hassan Nemazee is a lurid example of the human capacity for self-delusion, and a cautionary tale for all those savvy political players who take pride in their ability to size people up.

Seldom has so talented a con man flourished for so long in the confidence of the high and mighty. For two decades, Nemazee was a top fundraiser for the Democratic Party and-for the past 12 years, it turns out-a Ponzi scheme felon who stole hundreds of millions dollars of other people's money. Before he was unmasked by the FBI seven months ago, Nemazee campaigned behind the scenes to be a U.S. ambassador in the Obama administration, and personally lobbied his longtime friend, Joe Biden, to enlist his support for a high-level diplomatic post. . .

Nemazee had been a valued friend and supporter of Biden, Al Gore, John Kerry, Chuck Schumer, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were part of a cavalcade of powerful office-holders who dined regularly at the Park Avenue apartment. . .

For the 2006 election cycle, Nemazee signed on as finance chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, led by Senator Chuck Schumer. But Nemazee left abruptly, according to knowledgeable sources, after he and Schumer had an acrimonious falling out. The problem, say sources close to New York's senior senator, was that Schumer became frustrated when Nemazee failed to deliver on fundraising goals, and also suspected that he was using his title to burnish his credentials among the Democratic powers that be-and, even worse, was spending time soliciting money for Hillary Clinton.

Washington Times, 2006 - Donations from 23 executives of mortgage buyer Fannie Mae helped New York Democratic Sen. Charles E. Schumer raise more campaign funds than any of his colleagues in the past quarter, Bloomberg News reports, citing disclosure forms. Mr. Schumer raised $1.7 million in the three months ending Sept. 30 and has $18 million cash on hand for his 2004 re-election campaign, forms filed with the Federal Election Commission show. As a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Mr. Schumer is helping to write legislation that affects Fannie Mae, the largest U.S. mortgage buyer, and rival Freddie Mac. A bill designed to strengthen the government-chartered companies' regulation by shifting their oversight from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Treasury Department is stalled in Congress. Fannie Mae Chief Executive Officer Franklin Raines and Chief Financial Officer J. Timothy Howard, with 21 colleagues, gave a combined $13,750 to Mr. Schumer from July through the past month. Mr. Raines gave $1,000 to Mr. Schumer on July 18, the day after the banking committee held hearings on the company's regulation, FEC records show.

New York Times, 2009 - In an effort to defuse the most explosive issue in the debate over comprehensive health care legislation, a top Senate Democrat has proposed that any new government-run insurance program comply with all the rules and standards that apply to private insurance.

The proposal was made by Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the third-ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership. . .

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, asked Mr. Schumer to seek a solution. In his response, Mr. Schumer set forth these principles:

-* The public plan must be self-sustaining. It should pay claims with money raised from premiums and co-payments. It should not receive tax revenue or appropriations from the government.

- The public plan should pay doctors and hospitals more than what Medicare pays. Medicare rates, set by law and regulation, are often lower than what private insurers pay.

- The government should not compel doctors and hospitals to participate in a public plan just because they participate in Medicare.

Progressive Review, 1986 -   NORML reports that the National Guard is now   conducting counter-drug missions in all fifty states and   four territories. It logged nearly a half million flight crew   hours conducting surveillance of Americans' homes and   businesses and seized 7000 vehicles. Even liberals like   Rep. Charles Schumer think this is just fine. During a   congressional hearing, Schumer said, "Redefining [the National Guard's] role in the post Cold War era presents   exciting possibilities in the war against crime."