The inquisitor: Charles Schumer, leader of the anti-Bush crusade

National Review, August 8, 2005 by John J. Miller

MINUTES before the Senate Judiciary Committee began hearings on the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the federal bench in 2002, Democratic senator Chuck Schumer of New York was introduced to Estrada's mother. She informed the senator that when she was living in New York four years earlier, she had voted for him over the incumbent Republican, Alfonse D'Amato. "I hope you'll repay the favor," she added.

Schumer chuckled at her request. He took his seat, gaveled the hearing to order, and delighted in proclaiming her support. Then he proceeded to do everything in his power to avoid repaying the favor: He demanded sensitive documents, gave voice to accusations that Estrada was a right-wing nutjob, and speculated about the nominee's honesty: "I think we have some credibility problems here." At one awkward moment during his persistent badgering of Estrada, the senator snapped: "This takes a yes or no answer if you're being truthful with this committee."

This colorful performance was vintage Schumer--hungry for whatever scraps of publicity Estrada's mother might confer upon him, but also committed to the crafty partisanship that has made him one of the Senate's most belligerent Democrats. "There's a lot we do not know about Miguel Estrada," Schumer said at the hearing--even though Schumer himself apparently knew enough to condemn the man, just a few days earlier in The Nation, as "a Stealth missile--with a nose cone--coming out of the right wing's deepest silo."

Chuck Schumer is New York's other liberal senator. Whereas Hillary Rodham Clinton may be more important to her party's long-term ambitions, Schumer is undoubtedly more significant to its near-term goals: He is perhaps the key Democrat sitting on the Senate panel that soon will weigh in on the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to fill the first Supreme Court vacancy in more than a decade. In this regard, he is more important than chairman Patrick Leahy, more critical than attack-dog Ted Kennedy. "He's the smartest guy they've got," says Todd Gaziano of the Heritage Foundation.

There may not be a better embodiment of the career politician than the 54-yearold Brooklyn native. After scoring a perfect 1600 on his SAT test, Schumer went off to Harvard and stayed there through law school. Returning home, he decided to skip the bar and run for the state assembly instead. He was all of 23 years old at the time. He won that election, in 1974, and has been on the public payroll ever since, never losing a race as he climbed his way up from the backbenches of Albany to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1980 and, finally, to the Senate in 1998.

It's possible that Schumer won that initial Senate election because he had the good fortune of being called a "putzhead" by his GOP opponent. In what was perceived to be a nip-and-tuck race, the media had a field day as D'Amato first tried to deny using the Yiddish slur, but then was forced to admit that it had in fact escaped his lips. His campaign never recovered.

And Schumer never looked back. For his re-election last year, he raised more money than any other politician in the country except for George W. Bush and John Kerry--an impressive display of financial hustle that scared off just about every potential Republican candidate. Even his critics credit him with boundless energy. "The guy is tenacious," says one New York politico. "A shark can't stop swimming, and Schumer can't stop giving press conferences." When Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing that Miguel Estrada challenge Schumer in the 2004 election, the senator actually rang him up. "He wanted to berate me and tell me how wrong I was about this terrible ideologue," says Malanga. "He didn't seem to understand that I was half joking."

Press conferences and phone calls give Schumer the opportunity to pursue one of his favorite pastimes: grandstanding. He first gained notoriety in Washington with his brash crusade for gun control. "We are going to hammer guns on the anvil of a relentless legislative strategy," he declared in 1993, hours after a Long Island shooting. "We are going to beat guns into submission." Schumer can be especially strident on abortion. When Congress was debating a bankruptcy bill, he pushed an amendment to ban pro-life activists from avoiding fines by declaring themselves insolvent. These special rules would not have applied to animal-rights protesters or anyone else, and the controversy surrounding them wound up blocking a piece of sensible legislation for years. (It finally passed in March, without Schumer's meddling.)

Politicians are often good at hogging the spotlight, but Schumer is one of the best. It is a Beltway clich, to say that the most dangerous place in Washington is between a television camera and such-and-such a lawmaker--but the comment has been made about Schumer with more frequency than anybody else. "Sharing a media market with Chuck Schumer is like sharing a banana with a monkey," said Democratic senator Jon Corzine of New Jersey earlier this year. "Take a little bite of it and he'll throw his own feces at you."