The majority leader says the measure to help Ukraine and other recent bipartisan efforts show there is a path to success on Capitol Hill. But deep partisan differences and institutional problems remain.
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“I don’t think that Congress is dysfunctional,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said in an interview. “It’s that there are some dysfunctional people in Congress, and we can’t let them run the show.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, insists that Congress isn’t broken — it just has a stubborn glitch.
As he celebrated approval this week of a major national security spending measure to aid Ukraine and Israel that took months of wrangling and strategizing, Mr. Schumer said the success of the package validated his view that bipartisanship can prevail once extreme elements on Capitol Hill are sidelined.
“I don’t think that Congress is dysfunctional,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview. “It’s that there are some dysfunctional people in Congress, and we can’t let them run the show.”
The majority leader said that the passage of the foreign aid bill, the renewal of a warrantless electronic surveillance program and the approval of government funding for the year have shown that Congress can still function if its damaging glitch — right-wing lawmakers invested in chaos — is dealt out.
“They are nasty, they are negative and they don’t want to get anything done at all,” Mr. Schumer said of far-right Republicans in the House. He noted that Congress had been able to move ahead on big issues once Speaker Mike Johnson and a significant bloc of House Republicans decided to marginalize the ultraconservatives, even though it has prompted a threat to Mr. Johnson’s speakership.
“The idea that Congress can’t function in this modern world with technology and everything else — which admittedly makes it harder — has been disproved by a whole lot of things that succeeded in a bipartisan way,” he said. “But in each case, the hard right had to be resisted.”
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Source: nytimes.com
