SAN FRANCISCO — Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered a sharp critique of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday, suggesting he had forfeited a crucial bargaining chip by allowing a vote on Republicans’ government funding bill.

“I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” Pelosi told reporters during a news conference at a children’s hospital in San Francisco. “I think that’s what happened the other day.”

Pelosi — who spoke during an event to oppose House Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid — said she still supports Schumer, her longtime ally who’s come under fire from within his own party in recent days over his decision to allow the GOP’s bill to avert a government shutdown through last Friday.

But Pelosi, in response to a question, suggested that if Schumer hadn’t cleared the way, it would have given Democrats more leverage to fight proposed cuts to Medicaid and other social safety-net programs.

“We could have, in my view, perhaps, gotten them to agree to a third way,” Pelosi said. She said a potential outcome could have been a bipartisan continuing resolution to delay a shutdown for up to four weeks while negotiations continued.

She added, “They may not have agreed to it, but at least the public would have seen they’re not agreeing to it — and that then they would have been shutting (the) government down.”

It’s the second time in a week that Pelosi has criticized Schumer over his handling of the funding bill. On Friday, she suggested his move had played into a “false choice” that President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk had offered Congress: shutdown the government or give them a “blank check” to slash government spending.

Pelosi also praised House Democrats and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, her successor, for refusing to support Republicans’ stopgap spending measure, despite blowback from Trump’s administration and GOP leaders, who accused Democrats of risking a shutdown for political reasons.

Tensions between Schumer and Jeffries blew up last week after the Senate Democrat bucked his party’s move in the House. But the two have played nice in recent days, and Jeffries said Tuesday that he supports Schumer’s leadership.

Later Tuesday Pelosi noted her and Jeffries’ shared confidence in Schumer — and she was quick to suggest Democrats are poised to recapture the House in the midterm 2026 elections amid a “drumbeat” of protests over proposed cuts to Medicaid and other public programs.

“What happened last week was last week,” Pelosi said. “We’re going into the future.”

Tim Walz took a jab at Chuck Schumer over his decision to avert a government shutdown, accusing the party of ceding to Republicans.

“I believe that Chuck 100 percent believes that he made a decision that reduced the pain and the risk to Americans,” the Minnesota governor said in the latest episode of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast released on Tuesday. “I see it now that we’re in a point where … that pain is coming anyway and I think we gave up our leverage.”

Walz’s comments are the latest in the chorus of Democratic backlash aimed at Schumer over the Senate Democratic leader’s support for a Republican-backed stopgap measure last week to keep the government funded and prevent a government shutdown.

Walz has long been scheduled to be a guest on Newsom’s podcast, which launched on Tuesday. But Newsom’s conversation with Walz was rerecorded on Monday, according to a person familiar with the discussion who was granted anonymity to discuss it. The original conversation came on the same day Newsom taped his episode with the campus culture warrior Charlie Kirk.

But Walz wanted the chance to address news that had happened since then, like Schumer’s funding bill controversy.

As a result of Schumer and a small group of other Democrats’ support for the funding patch, Walz warned Newsom that Democrats will face blame for any negative fallout from the bill.

“To the American public who doesn’t do this for a living and is out doing their job, they said, ‘well, they passed this budget and they agreed with Donald Trump, and now we all own that,’” Walz said. “I think you should have made Donald Trump justify why things were getting so bad.”

Walz’s remarks about the funding controversy come on the heels of his recent critiques of the 2024 Harris-Walz campaign, where he said the ticket did not take enough risks. He said he — along with other Democrats — should have made a stronger effort to engage with voters, particularly through town halls.

Walz doubled down on criticism of his party during his interview with Newsom, saying the lack of coordination among Democrats on how to approach the funding debate only reinforced perceptions that the Democratic Party is fragmented.

“I think the public saying is, ‘you guys weren’t even coordinated on that,’” he said.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday called for the impeachment of the federal judge who ordered a two-week halt to his efforts to remove Venezuelan migrants using extraordinary war powers that haven’t been invoked for decades.

Trump’s call to remove U.S. District Judge James Boasberg — the chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C. — is the first time since taking office for his second term that he’s asked Congress to seek a judge’s removal, joining increasingly pointed calls by his top donor and adviser Elon Musk and a segment of his MAGA base.

Trump also suggested that “many” of the judges who have ruled against him in other cases should be impeached as well. It’s a significant incursion on the judiciary that comes as Trump has asserted unprecedented unilateral power over federal spending — despite Congress’ constitutional power of the purse — and sweeping authority to remove executive branch officials that previous presidents believed were protected by law.

Although the call represents a significant escalation, any impeachment effort is all but certain to be doomed in Congress, where narrow Republican majorities would lack the votes to remove a judge along party lines. Congress has been loath to entertain impeachment efforts for judges based purely on rulings they disagree with and has typically invoked the extraordinary procedures in cases of clear corruption or misconduct.

Trump, in a post on Truth Social Tuesday morning, called Boasberg a “troublemaker and agitator.” The president also boasted of his sweeping electoral win, underscoring the mandate he believes he was given by the American people to govern. (Judges are given lifetime appointments to insulate them from political pressure and shifts in public opinion.)

“FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY,” Trump wrote. “I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do.”

For Trump, the attack on Boasberg is also an attempt to settle a score with a significant figure in his long-running criminal cases. Boasberg, as the chief judge, presided over key aspects of the grand jury proceedings that led to Trump’s criminal charges in Washington, D.C. for his attempt to subvert the 2020 election. Among Boasberg’s decisions: Requiring former Vice President Mike Pence to testify to the grand jury over Trump’s objection, and ruling that hundreds of emails from Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) should be disclosed to investigators.

Boasberg also presided over some of the grand jury proceedings related to Trump’s criminal case for hoarding classified documents at his Florida estate.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has warned of the pernicious threat of politically motivated calls for the impeachment of judges over disagreements on rulings.

“Public officials … regrettably have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges — for example, suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations,” Roberts wrote in a New Year’s Eve message last year. “Attempts to intimidate judges for their rulings in cases are inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed. Public officials certainly have a right to criticize the work of the judiciary, but they should be mindful that intemperance in their statements when it comes to judges may prompt dangerous reactions by others.”

Prior to Trump’s social media post, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press briefing Tuesday that she had “not heard the president talking about impeachment.” But Trump allies, including conservative lawyer Mike Davis, had been floating a possible impeachment of Boasberg throughout the day on cable and conservative news networks.

The White House has, however, brushed off the idea that Trump’s expanding assertions of power over his coequal branches is causing a constitutional crisis, arguing that it is the courts who are overstepping their legal authority. Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have largely been content to allow Trump to override their prerogatives.

In court on Monday, Boasberg peppered the administration with questions about whether it had deliberately ignored his order to turn around planes carrying the deportees — an argument the Justice Department responded to by arguing that his verbal order did not count, only his written order.

The Justice Department has also asked a federal appeals court to have Boasberg removed from the case, but the appeals court has not yet acted on their demand. The administration is due to respond to Boasberg’s request for information about the flights by noon Tuesday.