Congress

No. 2 House Democrat won’t attend State of the Union

Published

8 months ago

February 24, 2026

House Minority Whip Katherine Clark said she will be skipping President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech Tuesday, becoming the most senior Democrat to boycott the annual address.

“I will be hearing from the people of my district about their personal experiences with skyrocketing costs, new barriers to health care, dismantled Social Security services, and brutal cuts to medical research,” the No. 2 House Democrat said in a statement.

The Massachusetts lawmaker pointed to the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens in Minnesota last month as a stalemate over Homeland Security funding heads into a second week. She also said Trump is “standing in the way of truth” in citing the DOJ’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have said they plan to attend Trump’s address. Jeffries has encouraged members to either sit in silent defiance or attend alternative programming as dozens of rank-and-file members have announced plans to skip the speech.

“Donald Trump’s presidency has been one broken promise after another, and the people of this country and the Commonwealth deserve so much better,” Clark said.

Congress

Democrats are ready to run Congress — and investigate all things Trump

Published

29 minutes ago

November 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Democrats are on track to win complete control of Congress, setting the stage for an unrelenting oversight platform in the next Congress that will zero in on both the Trump administration and the special interests that Republicans were reluctant to scrutinize over the last two years.

According to interviews with more than a dozen lawmakers, aides and attorneys, Democrats plan to use their new subpoena power and agenda-setting authority to target possible corruption among members of President Donald Trump’s family, Elon Musk’s leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency and the Department of Homeland Security’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics.

They could demand testimony from the chief executives of Big Tech on social media addiction, the dangers of artificial intelligence and the negative impacts data centers are having on local communities. They could haul in the heads of leading oil companies to answer for allegations the industry waged a decadeslong climate misinformation campaign to continue reaping massive profits.

And these are just a few items on the to-do list.

“I’d expect some pretty epic battles between the administration and Congress, as well as private sector targets that are prepared to fight back against Congress,” said Aaron Cutler, a partner at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader and former aide to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Many major Washington law firms, expecting a favorable night for Democrats, have already started hiring experienced lawyers to help their clients navigate new congressional scrutiny, Cutler added.

“LAWYER UP,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, posted on social media Tuesday as the party’s House majority was coming into focus.

The risk, however, is that Democrats’ vast investigative ambitions backfire, sucking up oxygen that might otherwise be spent trying to legislate. Though Trump is unlikely to sign many, if any, bills Democrats send to his desk that aren’t considered “must-pass,” Democrats will still be under pressure to show they can do something, even if it’s just laying the groundwork for a legislative agenda the party can enact if they also retake the White House in 2028.

“I think we would put the priority on things that have had an impact on cost of living for the American people — so any kind of corruption with the administration that has raised costs,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who, as a member of the House, led impeachment proceedings against the president in the first Trump administration.

Schiff suggested one such potential line of inquiry could be into Amazon.

“If federal contracting decisions are made not because a vendor has the best product or is offering it for the best price, but because, in the case of Amazon, it was willing to pay $40 million for a crappy movie about Melania [Trump], is that resulting in Amazon getting an advantage in cloud computing contracts or other defense contracts — that’s the kind of thing that costs taxpayers money, costs consumers more money, and there have been so many business payoffs of one sort or another,” said Schiff, referring to the first lady.

Over in the House, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wants to look into surveillance pricing, in which AI tools track a customer’s online habits to determine how much they should be paying for basic goods like groceries — and potentially driving up costs for everyone in the process. It’s an issue that energizes progressives, like Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar of Texas, as well as Republicans: Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri held a hearing on the issue in August.

Democrats are likewise expected to build on their oversight of data centers, including operators’ commitments to cover the full energy costs associated with their infrastructure, according to several senior committee Democrats and Democratic congressional aides.

They say they will also try to expose ways in which the administration’s actions could be contributing to high energy prices and more pollution, from the Iran war to the cancellation and slow-walking of renewable energy projects. Inquiries into prescription drug pricing could also lead to policy recommendations aimed at lowering health care costs.

But Democrats also could be heading towards a clash with some members intent on pursuing a more partisan, take-no-prisoners approach toward their oversight duties.

For instance, Garcia and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committees, have made clear they consider the Jeffrey Epstein investigation unfinished business. Raskin, a week before the midterms, released a staff report detailing sexual assault allegations against Trump by five separate women in a possible preview of the lines of inquiry Democrats could pursue.

The possibility that Democrats could undertake politically divisive impeachment proceedings against any number of Cabinet officials also looms large. Some Democrats are eager to oust the president himself, with Raskin saying over the summer he would not rule that out — even though the party is certain to remain well short of the two-thirds needed to convict in the Senate.

“I want to go straight to the top: Donald Trump,” Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said in an interview regarding impeachment. “And then everybody who was complicit in allowing him to do what he’s done, or working in concert with him on illegal things.”

One person in Trump’s orbit likely to absorb much of Democrats’ scrutiny is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is already the subject of a House impeachment effort.

Hegseth and the Defense Department could face even more scrutiny next year if Rep. Adam Smith, the Washington Democrat in line to be the next chair of the House Armed Services Committee, decides to revive a subcommittee dedicated solely to Pentagon oversight issues.

Smith will need to balance a need to reach bipartisan compromise on an annual defense policy package with the whole list of Pentagon controversies his members want to pursue. That includes a full accounting of the cost and impact of the Iran war, politicization of the military and Hegseth’s own performance.

“To be candid, Donald Trump should have already fired this guy,” Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. “I think this Iran war has been disastrous. It’s a major part of contributing to the cost of living emergency. American people are mad about it.”

On the House Ways and Means Committee, Democrats want to put forward new proposals to expand the popular child tax credit and beef up breaks for child-care expenses, and potentially work with Republicans on tax issues relating to retirees. The Senate Finance Committee could take up an idea floated over the summer by the likely incoming Senate Democratic Leader, Chuck Schumer, to quadruple a tax on stock buybacks by corporations.

But Democratic taxwriters are just as likely to spend next year scrutinizing the controversial decision to excuse Trump from IRS audits as part of a broader settlement between the president and the Justice Department, as well as the tax agency’s collaboration with Homeland Security to crack down on illegal immigration. They’ve also signaled plans to look into the tech industry’s use of corporate tax breaks, including whether Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s should be allowed to claim a research subsidy in conjunction with his company’s data center construction.

Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who are expected to return as chairs of House Ways and Means and Senate Finance, could face renewed calls to seize Trump’s still-hidden tax returns — a demand both men contended with during the first Trump administration.

The Senate’s primary oversight panel, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, could center on DHS’s execution of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.

Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who is in line to chair Homeland Security next year, has spent the past year building a team to help her use her position to “investigate and hold President Trump and his Administration accountable for its widespread corruption and wrongdoing,” said a person granted anonymity to describe her private planning. Members of that team have experience working in the White House, DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Hassan’s staff, the person said, will deploy resources to focus on “egregious” wrongdoing where there is “clear disapproval from the majority of Americans.”

Ari Hawkins, Andres Picon, Alfred Ng, Brian Faler, Connor O’Brien, Gabby Miller and Owen Dahlkamp contributed to this report.

Congress

What Hakeem Jeffries’ Albany years reveal about how he’d lead the House

Published

2 days ago

November 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

NEW YORK — On the road to becoming House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries toiled for years under top-heavy leadership. He bore witness to corruption in the highest ranks of government. And, as he rose in stature, he established himself as a persuasive orator, hyper-engaged colleague and prolific fundraiser.

And that was before he got to Congress.

As the 56-year-old legislator seeks to become the first Black speaker of the House, clues to how he engineered such a rapid rise — and how he’ll govern if Democrats win the House — can be traced back to the rough-and-tumble world of statehouse politics in New York, where he served as an assemblymember representing parts of Brooklyn from 2007 through 2012.

While in Albany, Jeffries hardly mastered the levers of power. He wasn’t around long enough to earn a committee chair position. He wasn’t senior enough to carry the conference’s marquee legislation. And he passed only a fraction of the 242 bills he sponsored.

Yet he carved out a legislative record establishing himself as a credible voice on criminal justice issues. And the lessons offered by Albany at the time — with half of its Legislature beset by factionalism and a hard-charging executive damaged by scandal — offered a valuable preview of what he could face in Washington.

Jeffries could inherit an unwieldy House. He could face a Senate with razor-thin margins. And he already has plans to launch probes into President Donald Trump and many of his aides.

But the leadership style he began developing in Albany is in many ways an odd fit with the current political moment.

In an age where voters are gravitating toward partisan pugilists, Albany colleagues almost universally recall Jeffries as a cerebral and studious legislator willing to work with peers of all ideological persuasions. They remember his speeches in conference meetings and the Assembly chamber that, while demonstrating a deep grasp of logic and policy, were delivered only infrequently, as if to maximize their impact.

“He thinks things out like a chess player, four or five moves in advance,” said David Paterson, a Democrat who served as New York governor during some of Jeffries’ tenure in Albany. “To me, he’s like a modern-day Columbo. While you’re putting him down, he’s planning how to take you out.”

As Jeffries now seeks one of the most difficult jobs in American politics, his origin story underscores a broader change in Democratic politics.

Once an insurgent candidate who so thoroughly irked the New York establishment they drew his apartment out of the Assembly district he eventually won, Jeffries is now facing criticism from the party’s left. From their perch, the Democratic leader is out of touch with the issues animating the party base and far too reliant on a bygone way of doing business.

Whether he can prove them wrong will not only write the next chapter of his story. It will influence where the cartoon dust cloud of infighting that is today’s Democratic Party drifts next.

“He comes off as someone who fits more directly into the prior generation: Very buttoned-up, very message-tested talking points,” said one New York Democratic consultant granted anonymity to candidly discuss Jeffries’ political standing. “There’s a handful of issues that are driving the extremes of the party, and he tends to fall squarely into the older thinking on them: Israel is one. Medicare for All is another. I’m not saying the vanguard is right. But he’s not on the vanguard.”

At least, not anymore.

After stints at a white-shoe law firm and as a corporate lawyer for Viacom and CBS, Jeffries launched his first political campaign in 2000 at the age of 29, going hard at incumbent Roger Green over accusations he was failing an Assembly district that included the Brooklyn enclave where Jeffries was born, raised and had moved back to with his wife.

“You’re out of touch,” a mustachioed Jeffries said during a heated debate in which Green later stormed off the set.

Jeffries, a devout Baptist, had brought up Green’s Muslim faith on air, which the incumbent found divisive. It ultimately didn’t matter. Jeffries lost by 18 points.

When New York redrew its Legislative boundaries two years later, Jeffries was meticulously notched out of the seat, an act of institutional retribution for his perceived insolence, giving him an early taste for creative line-drawing that has parallels to today’s redistricting wars between Democrats and Republicans. He challenged the incumbent anyway, this time with even worse results.

It wasn’t until Green gave up his seat to run for Congress that Jeffries won in 2006 after moving back into the redrawn 57th District.

Scott Levenson, head of political consulting and lobbying firm the Advance Group, was hired by Jeffries on those early campaigns and said his client had a congenital predisposition for public service: His mother was a social worker and his father was a state substance abuse counselor. Politics, activism, Black history and the expectation of academic achievement were very much discussed at the dinner table.

“He comes from an active political family,” Levenson said in an interview. “He didn’t grow up in the restaurant business.”

Even back then, Levenson said, Jeffries was exhibiting qualities that would come to define him in Congress.

“The guy bangs the phone all the time; and he’s got a nice way about him, so people want to talk to him,” Levenson said of Jeffries’ efforts to raise money and build coalitions. “I talk to Republicans who don’t hear bombastic, they hear thoughtful and balanced. And with the margin he’s going to be served, that’s probably a good thing.”

In January 2007, at long last, Jeffries arrived in Albany as a backbench legislator. What he found was the country’s third-largest public institution — second only to the federal government and the State of California — in chaos.

The state Capitol during that era was riven by Democratic infighting and scandal — giving Jeffries a front row seat for how dysfunction and small majorities can dash legislative dreams and how more disciplined institutions can fill the power vacuum.

Beginning in 2009, Democrats spent an unhappy two years leading the state Senate, an era marred by intraparty feuds and a debilitating leadership coup. Several senators would go on to be accused of engaging in public corruption during these years.

The governor, Eliot Spitzer, charged into office as a national political celebrity, only to squander that momentum by waging war with Democrats and Republicans alike. He resigned in 2008 in the middle of a prostitution scandal, paving the way for Paterson, his lieutenant, to take over for the remainder of his term.

The brunt of governing fell to Jeffries’ colleagues in the Democratic-dominated state Assembly.

“It definitely weighed on the Assembly that we were the adult institution in the room,” said Rory Lancman, a colleague who worked with Jeffries on several pieces of legislation. “But also, that meant we could dictate terms to an unusual degree.”

By that time, the chamber had been led for over a decade by the powerful Manhattan Democrat Sheldon Silver. His top-down approach — deciding which bills came to the floor for a vote, doling out leadership stipends to allies and punishing dissenters — rankled lawmakers. But Silver, who would be ousted from power in 2015 after being accused of felony fraud and corruption, maintained one of the few stable centers of power in Albany until Andrew Cuomo’s election as governor in 2010.

It was in this atmosphere — a combination of deep Democratic Party disarray and iron-fisted rule — that Jeffries came of political age before ever working under the velvet-gloved iron fist of California Rep. Nancy Pelosi and prosecuting Trump’s first impeachment.

By the numbers, Jeffries was a middle-of-the-pack legislator, according to a Blue Light News analysis of his performance in 2011, his penultimate year in office. He sponsored 87 bills (the 27th most in a 99-person Democratic conference), backed four that were approved by both houses of the Legislature (45th) and voted the same way as leadership 98 percent of the time (62nd).

In his final year in the statehouse, Jeffries was fighting an intense congressional primary against then-New York City Council member Charles Barron. As is common for state lawmakers seeking higher office, he missed 75% of votes in the Assembly.

But numbers aren’t everything in the state Capitol, where much of the action takes place behind closed doors. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, Silver’s successor, said Jeffries’ oratory supporting legislation to change the way prison inmates are counted in the U.S. Census stood out. That measure, which tallied people according to their home communities rather than the districts where they were imprisoned, ultimately passed as part of Paterson’s state budget.

“There’s certain legislators where, when there’s a debate that they’re in, you stop whatever you’re doing because they have such command of the issues,” Heastie said.

Jeffries, he added, “is one of the best communicators I’ve seen in my 26 years in the Legislature.”

While in Albany, Jeffries also began to develop an understanding of legislative institutions, which would go on to aid his meteoric rise in Congress.

Several years into his tenure in the state Capitol, Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke called a meeting of Black elected officials in Brooklyn to address one of the most explosive issues of the day: The NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk to target mostly Black and Latino men for invasive and often public searches.

At the time, police officers were on track to stop and frisk more than a half-million New Yorkers with nearly no criminal charges to show for it. Clarke wanted something done.

At the close of the meeting, members of the New York Civil Liberties Union approached Jeffries with an idea, according to Donna Lieberman, executive director of the organization since 2001: Would the assemblymember carry legislation to bar the NYPD from electronically retaining identifying information about people stopped and released without further legal action?

Jeffries agreed, and, after introducing the bill, gave what several colleagues recalled as a stirring floor speech about the need for urgent action. The initiative turned out to be a relatively easy sell in the deep-blue Assembly. It was in the state Senate, where Democrats had just won a narrow and ultimately fleeting majority, where one of Jeffries’ most memorable legislative victories was at risk.

Selecting a cosponsor in the other chamber is an art unto itself. A successful pick requires knowing alliances, rivalries and the proclivities of leadership in a separate legislative body. Jeffries’ decision demonstrated all of those things, according to one person involved in negotiations who was granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations. But it also showed a willingness to reach outside his circle of core allies — in this case, by tapping Eric Adams, then a freewheeling state senator with an overlapping district and, years later, New York City’s mayor.

The two men have long had a cool relationship, even if they’ve mostly praised each other in public. Polar opposites in style, they had backed different candidates for city comptroller and public advocate in 2009 and would go on to fight numerous other proxy battles over the years.

In 2010, though, Adams, a former police captain, stood in well as a credible messenger and outspoken critic of overpolicing. During closed-door Senate Democratic conference meetings, according to the person involved in the bill negotiations who spoke with Blue Light News, Adams would patiently explain to members vulnerable to pressure from police unions why stop-and-frisk was not actually improving public safety.

Jeffries, meanwhile, agreed to limit the bill’s scope to New York City to garner support from upstate members.

“I think he was very shrewd,” said the person involved in the bill negotiations. “He was feeling his way into the politics of it and trying to get a read of how things were cutting.”

The bill’s passage gave both Jeffries and Adams a major legislative win, propelling their careers on upward trajectories and sparking a last-ditch and ultimately unsuccessful push for a gubernatorial veto from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly.

“Stop-and-frisk was becoming a national issue, and the NYPD, love ’em or hate ’em, is a force to be reckoned with,” Lieberman said, recalling Jeffries’ work on the legislation. “This was his first foray onto the national stage. It was important for him.”

Manhattan Democratic Chair Keith Wright, a former state assemblymember, summed up Jeffries’ Albany years by recalling longstanding bipartisan basketball games in which they both participated.

“He didn’t have to be the one scoring the points, but he was down underneath the basket getting the rebound,” Wright said, noting that Jeffries was not a trash-talker. “He was making sure other people were scoring the points.”

That approach has proven fruitful. During his latter years in state government, he was already drawing comparisons to Barack Obama. And once he got to Congress, he rocketed up the pecking order to become chair of the House Democratic Caucus in just six years before being elected minority leader at the end of 2022.

It may not have been fast enough to keep up with an increasingly fractured Democratic Party.

While he enjoys strong support among House Democrats broadly, the Jeffries school of politics is already seen as passé by the young activist class, portending a potentially difficult speakership that will require him to manage factions with deeply disparate goals. The left sees him as too deferential to Israel supporters and has criticized him for taking his name off Medicare for All legislation after co-sponsoring it for years.

Ironically, though, it’s a dynamic Jeffries has dealt with his entire career, according to Basil Smikle Jr., the former head of the New York State Democratic Party and generational peer of the presumptive House speaker.

Green, the Assembly incumbent Jeffries ran such a spirited campaign against, got his start in the civil rights movement. And along with an entire generation of Black activists, he paved the way for younger leaders like Jeffries. That generational transfer of power, however, did not always come easily, according to Smikle.

Ambitious young New Yorkers like Jeffries, who broke with the establishment to endorse Obama for president in 2008, were eager to have their shot at shaping government. Battle-hardened activists, though, remained skeptical of their juniors, who came of age long after the struggles against racism, voter suppression, segregation and outright violence began.

“In a way, it has come full circle,” Smikle said. “Hakeem has had to prove himself as an activist throughout history. And he’s still trying to prove that he has that muscle.”

Madison Fernandez contributed to this report.

Congress

Chuck Schumer’s leadership hopes run through the midterms

Published

2 days ago

November 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Chuck Schumer is about to find out what his path to keeping power looks like.

If Democrats win a Senate majority in Tuesday’s midterms, pulling off what was once seen as a longshot feat, senators and aides across the caucus agree the New Yorker is a shoo-in to return as top leader — rebuffing critics who have lambasted how he has handled President Donald Trump.

“Schumer delivering a Democratic Senate certainly justifies another term as leader,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), capturing the consensus sentiment.

But if Democrats fail to meet their recently expanded expectations, Schumer could be in for a bumpier path back to power.

If Democrats manage to end up with fewer seats — a scenario most in the party consider highly unlikely as polling continues to move away from Republicans — outside progressive groups that have been gearing up to demand a leadership change regardless of the election outcome could suddenly find traction among the senators who will decide Schumer’s fate.

Multiple factions believe Schumer will hold on as leader, however, so long as his party picks up seats — though it might not be without some internal horsetrading and headaches.

“This isn’t last year,” said a Schumer-neutral Senate Democratic aide granted anonymity to speak about internal caucus dynamics, referring back to government funding fights with Trump that had many Democratic senators publicly fuming over how Schumer handled them.

But if Democrats are in the minority, the 75-year-old leader could find himself dealing with members who publicly break with him, questions from colleagues about whether he will retire in 2028 or even an unlikely longshot challenger, according to five people interviewed about Schumer’s standing.

Senate Democrats are expected to hold their leadership elections in early December, and Schumer declined to discuss in a recent interview how he plans to campaign for another two years as top dog, saying he was focused solely on the midterms.

“Look, I have focused totally like the North Star on winning back the Senate. And I think people recognize that we have had a lot of success,” Schumer told reporters in late September when asked about his critics.

The challenge for Schumer is the election map remains volatile in the final stretch before Election Day.

Democrats are confident they’ll pick up one seat from Republicans — in North Carolina, where Schumer personally recruited former Gov. Roy Cooper to run. They’re cautiously optimistic about a host of other Republican-held states, including Ohio, Iowa and Texas — where the establishment’s preferred nominees all won.

However, some races where Democrats have had high hopes continue to hang in the balance — including Maine, where the party’s initial nominee, Graham Platner, imploded, with replacement Troy Jackson struggling to gain distance from GOP incumbent Susan Collins. The Michigan race remains in margin-of-error territory with Democrats locked in eleventh-hour infighting. Rep. Haley Stevens, the Schumer-backed candidate who lost the Democratic primary, endorsed Republican Mike Rogers on Sunday over hard-left Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed.

Meanwhile, the Alaska race has been rocked in recent days by a New York Times report that national Democratic operatives schemed to recruit a same-named candidate to confuse voters who would otherwise support Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. Schumer said last week he had no knowledge of or participation in the effort.

Many of the factors that will decide the election lie well outside of Schumer’s control, and while Schumer’s standing has improved as Republicans’ fortunes have dimmed, he is still the subject of latent dissatisfaction in corners of the party’s ranks.

Schumer could also be welcoming freshmen who have been critical of his leadership.

Illinois Democrat Juliana Stratton, who is poised to win her Senate race next week, will not support Schumer for leader, according to her spokesperson. Neither would Minnesota Senate hopeful Peggy Flanagan, whose spokesperson reiterated her position that “we need a progressive champion to lead Senate Democrats and that’s not Chuck Schumer.”

Schumer will likely make the case he helped Democrats win seats regardless of the outcome by pointing to his recruiting coups and the hundreds of millions of dollars in financial support he’s directed to candidates — including those like Jackson and El-Sayed who weren’t his first picks. Spokespeople for the two men did not respond to a request for comment on whether they would support Schumer for leader.

Some Democrats speculate that blame for a narrow failure to retake the majority could fall not on Schumer but on the Senate Democratic campaign arm and its current chair, his fellow New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

Schumer can also count on a deep well of support among his colleagues, built on more than two decades of involvement in recruiting, fundraising and otherwise overseeing the Senate Democratic political apparatus.

“He’s done a good job in terms of helping to recruit great candidates for us to get the majority,” Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) said of Schumer, while adding Democrats need to “get the majority” before talking about internal leadership.

Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) also told Blue Light News that she is supporting Schumer, and another Democratic senator, granted anonymity given the sensitivity of the leadership discussions, added there was “every indication” Schumer will be again elected leader.

A major complication for Schumer’s critics is that no one else appears eager to take on what is frequently a thankless job, despite months of calls from outside groups and some House Democrats for an alternative candidate. The leadership election will be conducted by secret ballot, giving lawmakers the shield of anonymity — and Schumer needs only a simple majority of Democratic senators to win.

There’s also a concern that a leadership fight would distract from Trump, the Iran conflict and looming end-of-year legislative battles, with some suggesting critics could instead lobby for caucus changes or other commitments that would let them say they secured concessions from Schumer.

“Is there someone running against Schumer that I don’t know about?” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico when asked if he’d back Schumer for leader. “You can’t defeat someone if there’s not a challenger. Before there’s a race, there has to be at least two folks running for it.”

Some progressive groups see Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, previously the No. 3 Senate Democrat, as a possible bridge away from Schumer, but she is not planning to run, according to a person granted anonymity to speak about her plans. Nor is Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who is running for the No. 2 slot.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is currently the No. 5 Senate Democrat, is now eyeing a move up but not the top job. A spokesperson for Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who is currently No. 4, declined to comment.

But Booker said during a BLN appearance last week that “you’ve got to give” praise to Schumer for the midterms, calling him a “key player in making sure we have a real strategy to win back the United States Senate.”

Lower down the ladder, Sen. Adam Schiff is interested in a leadership bid, according to a person close to the Californian who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. Democrats also view Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey as another potential future member of the leadership team.

Even the handful of members who have been most vocal about wanting to help direct the party’s future — some of them eyeing presidential bids in 2028 — are so far keeping their powder dry.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), for instance, responded to speculation he might mount a run for leader by saying “that has just not been my focus.”

“My focus has been on what the Democratic Party will stand for in 2028 and winning back the White House in 2028,” he said in an interview. Pressed on whether he’ll support Schumer, he added, “At this point I just want to see … the outcome of the 2026 midterms.”