The cohosts of The View promised to bring the tough questions to Chuck Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats, when he joined the show live on Tuesday (March 18). At first, his filibustering skills came in handy during the interview, as he occupied almost all of the speaking time to get his message across in the first segment… until after the commercial break, when Sunny Hostin, the harshest critic of his vote on the panel, got her turn to grill him.
Whoopi Goldberg started the discussion off by asking Schumer why he decided to vote for the continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown, and that’s when Schumer went into a full-on diatribe about his rationale and batted away several interruption efforts.
“So look, I knew it was a difficult choice, and I knew that I get a lot of criticism for my choice, but I felt as a leader, I had to do it. Here’s why. The CR bill was bad, no question. And it allowed a slush fund, which allowed money to be pushed around… The alternative is cut off the government spending. And here’s what would happen if we cut off government spending — it would be devastation like we have never seen.”
Schumer went on to detail how he believes the Republicans would’ve taken advantage of the situation, saying, “Trump, Musk, DOGE, and this really evil man people don’t know about [Russell] Vought, who is the head of OMB [the Office of Management Budget], which determines the spending, they could cut off anything they want simply by saying it’s not essential. So day two, SNAP, food for poor kids, not essential. Day four, mass transit, New York City’s subway and subways all over, not essential. Day seven, Medicaid, not essential. ‘People don’t need Medicaid. They should get their own health care.’ And this would happen over and over and over again, and there’s no check.”
He also added that the problem would only escalate from there, arguing, “The biggest problem is they have determined that the courts have no say, and the only say is the executive branch. Now, in the old days, when there was a shutdown, they’d work it out. But this is a different kettle of fish. They hate the government. They want to shut down everything… There’s no exit strategy. How do you get out of a shutdown? Guess who determines it? Trump, Musk… They’re the only ones. And one of the Republican senators told one of the Democratic senators, ‘You get us in this, we’re staying in for six months, nine months, a year, ’til we decimate the entire federal operation.’ So it was so bad that I felt I had to do this.”
Schumer went on to claim that he would’ve received even more backlash if he voted the other way and forced a government shutdown: “If we ended up a shutdown, three weeks from now, people would come to me and they’d say, ‘They just cut off Medicaid. They just got rid of my veterans benefits, stop it.’ And I said, ‘We can’t. We’re in a shutdown.’ And then they’d say to me, ‘Why did you let the shutdown happen?’ So a lot of people responded to the anguish. I appreciate it. I am sure I wake up three in the morning sometimes so worried about the future of the country under these oligarchs, or whatever you know as, yeah, oligarchs, I guess, and but you’ve got to do you’ve got to find we are fighting them to tooth and nail in every way we can. But you got to fight them smart.”
He also responded to Trump’s public praise for his vote by saying it was simply “trolling.” “He always tries to confuse people. He tries to hide what he does,” he said.
Schumer was then invited to defend himself against calls from certain members of his party for him to step down from a leadership position, and he said, “We have a lot of really strong talent in the Senate, in the House, in the governors, we have a great bench. But as for the Senate caucus, of which I’m the leader, I should be the leader. And let me just say this, one of the things I am known to be very good at is how to win Senate seats. In other words, I’m a strategist in terms of recruiting candidates, helping the candidates run campaigns, and winning.”
“I felt as a leader I had to do it.”
Senate Minority Leader @SenSchumer defends his decision to vote for the Republicans’ House-approved government funding bill, telling @TheView a government shutdown would have been “devastation like we have never seen.” pic.twitter.com/MOvquCLS6M
— The View (@TheView) March 18, 2025
After the break, Hostin repeated some of the same point she’d made about Schumer on the prior show, including some pointed criticism about the senator specifically. “It gives me no pleasure to say this to you because we are friends, but I think you caved. I think you and nine other Democrats caved. I don’t think you showed the fight that this party needs right now because you’re playing with a rule book where the other party has thrown that rule book away. And so in my view, what you did really was supporting that GOP partisan bill. The Democrats had no input, and it cleared the way to Donald Trump and Elon Musk to gut Social Security, to gut Medicare, to gut Medicaid. Why did you lead Democratic senators to play by that book that the Republicans are not playing by?”
After shaking his head through her statement and question, Schumer responded with, “I’d say, Sunny, no one wants to fight more than me, and no one fights more than me. You got to fight smart… The CR was bad. I hated it, but it does far less damage. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, are far more susceptible to being eliminated, which is what that horrible Musk [wants]. Can you imagine this guy, Musk, a billionaire, saying $1,100 for a senior citizen is not necessary? There are many fewer cuts in that bill than that would be in a shutdown… [There were] two choices: one bad, the other devastating. One chops off one of your fingers, the other chops off your arm.”
He then promised, “I want to fight, and we are fighting. We’re going to fight every day on this every day… We’re going to stick it to them and fight smart and win.”
The View, weekdays, 11 a.m. ET, ABC
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
