Tipsheet

Chuck Schumer Makes Pretty Rich Claims About 'Threats of Violence' From the Senate Floor

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  November 14, 2022 9:30 PM

Speaking from the Senate floor on Monday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speculated as to why it is that Democrats performed better than expected in last week's midterm elections. With Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto's (D-NV) projected win Saturday, Democrats will maintain control of the chamber. In addition to claiming that "Democrats had a strong agenda here, and did things for the American people," Schumer drew a contrast to the "negativity and divisiveness" from "MAGA Republicanism" as well as "threats of violence" and "violence itself."

In voting to leave Democrats in control of the Senate, Schumer claimed, "the American people stepped back from the precipice and chose progress and getting things done, rather than the voices of divisiveness, nastiness, and lack of complete truth and honor."

When it comes to specific examples of "threats of violence" and "violence itself," Schumer mentioned Democrats' favorite talking point of January 6, but also about election workers who supposedly "get threatened." The majority leader went on to blame Republicans even more so, as he claimed "too many Republican leaders either condoned the violence, or even aided and abetted the threats of violence."

There appears to be no stories of election workers having faced actual violence this past week. What news coverage there has been pertains to the 2020 election, or threats of violence. Such coverage also includes steps that the federal government as well as social media companies have taken to handle. threats, as highlighted in Cat Zakrzewski's report for The Washington Post from last Tuesday. 

That Schumer would lament "threats of violence" is also particularly rich, given that he himself threatened Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh if they did not vote the way in which he wished them to in the June Medical Services LLC v. Russo case from 2020 to do with abortion regulations. "You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions," Schumer, then the Senate minority leader, told a cheering crowd in March 2020 outside the Supreme Court. He mentioned the justices by name in such a screed. 

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Given that justices cannot merely be impeached for not voting the way a senator demands them to, it wasn't clear what kind of ramifications Schumer was specifically speaking about. He nevertheless doubled down, though. 

Two years later, in June, a suspect was arrested for planning an assassination attempt against Justice Kavanaugh. It was also revealed that he had planned to target multiple conservative justices. 

More recently, Schumer dismissed the illegal protests against conservative justices, just as so many in the Biden administration have done. When asked "are you comfortable with protests that we saw outside the homes of Supreme Court justices over the weekend," he said "yes," if they were peaceful, and went on to excuse it, laughing as he joked that people had protested his house as well. 

Schumer's comments from the Senate floor, as our friends at Twitchy highlighted, were resoundingly mocked, not just when it comes to the influx of GIF replies, but also those calling him out as a liar.