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.”
Since Republicans took control of the House in 2023, Mr. Schumer has repeatedly emphasized that any measures intended to become law would need to be shaped in a bipartisan way because the Senate and White House are under the control of Democrats.
It sounds like common sense, considering the partisan divide and the need for the House, Senate and President Biden to ultimately sign off. But it has not proven so easy to achieve given the attempts by the far right to exert its influence and insist on its positions.
The federal government over the past year came perilously close to a first-ever default and escaped damaging government shutdowns multiple times only at the very last minute. At the same time, House Republicans have tried to build a case to impeach Mr. Biden and did impeach his homeland security secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, only to watch Senate Democrats dismiss the case in about three hours, setting off a string of Republican recriminations.
The foreign aid bill was also approved only after months of delay and after being declared all but dead. But the outcome has stirred discussion on Capitol Hill over whether a Congress that has struggled do much has finally found a governing center that could revive the legislative process.
Events will have to play out over the coming months to test that theory, but significant differences remain between the two parties that will make finding common ground difficult and the coalition governing that has broken out on Capitol Hill in recent months hard to replicate. An approaching election will only highlight the divide.
Approving the foreign bill could make it more difficult to coalesce, as Republicans who backed it retrench to reassure their voters of their conservative bona fides in the run-up to the election. For instance, Mr. Johnson, under fire from the far right for bringing the Ukraine aid to the floor, traveled to New York on Wednesday to denounce the pro-Palestinian student protests at Columbia University. The visit drew him praise from some unhappy with his handling of the aid package, but exacerbated a bitter split among lawmakers over the Israel-Gaza war.
Even as Mr. Schumer joined forces with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, on the aid to Ukraine, Mr. McConnell was hammering his Democratic counterpart for calling for a change in the Israeli government once the conflict in Gaza was settled. Their Ukraine partnership reflected common cause on that topic, not a realignment on a host of issues. Mr. McConnell is now intensely focused on winning Senate seats and making Mr. Schumer the minority leader next year.
“We did work together on this; we both thought it was important to do it,” Mr. McConnell said of his partnership with Mr. Schumer on Ukraine. “But it wasn’t about relationships. It was about the substance.”
The universe of existential issues that can cause lawmakers to rise to the occasion, such as the push to assist a democratic ally in a battle for survival against Russian aggression, is also limited. Immigration issues continue to divide the parties significantly, as evidenced by the collapse of a bipartisan border security bill in February. A bipartisan House-passed tax bill has stalled in the Senate despite widespread support, as Republicans assess whether they might get a better deal next year if they win the majority.
Fundamental institutional problems also exist that could inhibit a new turn toward bipartisanship. At a seminar on “Fixing Congress” convened on Thursday by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center on Capitol Hill, former senators and House members dissected a number of developments hindering Congress.
The list included a very short workweek, siloing by party, reluctance to take tough votes, decreasing emphasis on policy expertise, a preponderance of leader-driven legislation and the always intense focus on primary challenges and re-election.
“There really isn’t a governing mentality in Washington right now,” said John Yarmuth, a former Democratic House member from Kentucky who led the Budget Committee. “There is an electoral mentality.”
But Mr. Schumer says he sees cause for hope. He noted that Democrats were secure enough in their political standing that they were willing to make serious concessions on border security to strike a deal with Senate Republican negotiators even though it fell apart once it came under attack from former President Donald J. Trump.
“I’m an optimist,” Mr. Schumer said. “You’ve got to persist, you’ve got to be bipartisan and you’ve got to resist the clarion call of MAGA.”