Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for The Intercept, said Tuesday that congressional Democrats are less likely to concede ground to Republicans on COVID-19 relief funding this year when compared with the party’s response to the financial crisis and Great Recession.
“I think there are two things going on here,” Grim said in a Hill.TV interview. The first, he said, is that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who secured the position after Democrats won both Georgia Senate runoff elections in early January, “wants to remain Senate majority leader.”
Second, he said, Schumer “also doesn’t want to have to face a primary challenge from AOC in 2022,” he said, referencing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “I think people close to him and observers of New York politics, given his support upstate, [think] he’d probably do fine” in such a challenge, but “it’d be embarrassing, it would cost him a ton of money. It would be a huge distraction from what he had wanted to do, which is run the Senate, his entire life.”
Grim also highlighted the role Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is playing now, with her push for a smaller COVID-19 response, to the congressional response to the previous recession.
“It just so happens that Chuck Schumer and most of the other Democrats in the Senate and Democrats in the House were around in 2009 and 2010, and they saw Susan Collins play this precise same game back then that she played now,” he said.
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