Chuck Schumer and the Collaborators

Published Mar 19, 2025, 4:00 AM

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Welcome to k That here, a podcast increasingly ruled by an absolutely unhinged and unrestrained band of Nazis, and apparently they're democratic collaborators. I am your host, Mia Wong with Vus James Stout.

I'm Miya's collaborator today.

Yay, this is a collaborator. Good. We are talking today about collaborator bad.

So.

On Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer and his allies, in an act of democratic collaboration with the regime that looks even more hideous now than it did then, in the wake of a series of absolutely horrific deportations in the last few days, voted for basically a continuing funding resolution. So this is this is a little bit complicated, but I believe in US we can get through a little tiny bit of Senate bullshit. So basically what's happening is that they need a resolution to keep funding the government for a little bit until more negotiations can happen to fund a budget. There has been a budget. Basically, like we keep seeing this over and over again. They're keep being continuing funding resolutions, they keep almost being government shutdowns because if there's not a continuing funding resolution, and there's no budget. The government doesn't have any money. What happened here was that, So in the Senate you can filibuster this and a whole bunch of Senators Schumer and others who we will be reading out later after we talk about what this resolution actually did, because it's unhinged. So you've probably been hearing. If you've been hearing about this, you've been hearing you called a culture vote. So what that is is basically the absolute shortest version of it is, it's a vote to kill a philibuster on the bill. You filibuster by continuing debate. Culture ends debate, centria, et cetera, et cetera. So this resolution is staggeringly unhinged. It is not a very long funding continuation. It includes thirteen billion dollars and cuts a non military spending and also six billion dollars in military spending cuts. There are a lot of things that have been sort of defunded by this, including like a lot of like housing and urban development stuff, so research ship, you know, And that's obviously really bad because normally with these resolutions you're just sort of like continuing the funding, right, but this is not a normal continuing resolution. This is it is over It is very, very over dramatic to do the thing that a lot of people have been doing, which is comparing it to the enabling acts that the Nazis passed.

Yeah it's not.

But but Comma, this is a completely unhinged continuing resolution. There has never been a continuing resolution like this ever, and it is Jenny Winley. It is another step down the path of effectively having Trump running the government as a dictator by sort of pure fiat. And Okay, you usually say this and you think this is an exaggeration, but what this Continuing Resolution actually does is normally in one of these resolutions, Congress tells you, executive how parts of the budget are supposed to be sent right, it does allocations. It'll be like, okay, so there's this money for this thing, and it goes to this purpose and you have to spend it here. This Continuing Resolution just like doesn't do that. Yeah, And the goal of it is just to let Trump do whatever the fuck he wants with the money by not actually giving out Congressional things to specifically allocated. So this is more of a thing we've been seeing more and more, which is Congress specifically like delegating and abandoning its constitutional power to be the people who set the budget and just heading it over to the executive so there can be a single unitary executive that runs the entire governments.

Yeah, I mean when you combine it with the open defiance of the court. So you saw this weekend with deportation, right, like, it's not a good not a good outlook actually, like it is in terms of the old separation of powers, which is you know, supposed to be a thing.

Yeah, you know, you could you could argue about whether the American Revolution was about the king being able to set taxes because that was technically a thing controlled by the British Parliament. But like it is, for example, the issue that like the Revolution of seventeen eighty nine was fought over, right like like that that there shouldn't be a single unitary executive who gets to fucking set the budget.

It's fundamentally I don't want to say unconstitutional, because I guess I don't get to decide what is unconstitutional and to the extent that it matters, fucking.

Fuck if we get well, it doesn't matter. Yeah, but it is like obviously hideously unconstitutional.

It's entirely against the basic principles of the constitution, right, like the sene Kwan none of the US Constitution, to use a fancy word, is separation of powers. Is It's not like the kind of the point of a thing is to not just have one older dude in charge like like that That is the English way.

Yeah, and this is this is the fundamental like principles upon which the liberal notion of democracy is based. And I use liberal in like the seventeen yes early eighteen hundred cents of the word liber right, which is that, like you believe in democracy. This bill effectively just allows Trump to fund and defund programs at will. I mean there's you know, there are there are specific things like boundaries in which she can't and can't do this. But I'm going to read some stuff from Senator Patty Murray, who is the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is the committee that handles like where money goes in the budget. Right, it's much appropriations, et cetera. So she, you know, is one of the senators who sort of understands its intimately. She wrote a fact sheet about this, which is fucking terrifying. I'm just going to quote from that because good God. Quote. Under this continuing resolution, the Trump administration could, for example, decide not to suspend funding previously allocated for Combating Fence and all the Support Act and other Substance abuse and mental health care programs, or specific NIAH priorities like Alzheimer's disease and vaccine research, and instead steer funding to other priorities if it's choosing. It could also pick and choose which military reconstruction, Army Corps, or transit improvement and expansion projects to withdraw funding without direction from Congress, leaving democratic states and priorities in the lurch.

Yeah, that's that is like, that's not great, Like even like I don't think people realize how much damage is could do and it like yeah, yeah, they have a year of just randomly slashing fit. Not only is it the programs who are affected, right, things that are cut, the certainty that contractors will get paid, the certainty that if you have a contract with the government it is a reliable thing, Like that will have devastating economic consequences if they just start randomly yoinking contracts and not paying people as they did with the USAID suppliers.

Right, Yeah, so like there is also a bunch of funding cuts for things like the Army Corps of Engineers, and like, there are a lot of valid criticisms you can have about the Army Corps of Engineers, and for example, the way it like has structurally fucked the entire city of New Orleans. But the thing is not giving them money to do hurricane prevention is not gonna help that. And the thing about this, right, because this resolution has thirteen billion indirect budget cuts and then it also allows Trump to do more cuts on top of it by doing by doing these funding allocation things, right, So it's it's like it's it's a fucking like double Yeah, there's a sort of double set of cuts here. And this includes you know, he can he can relegate money away from the FAA. One of the most absolutely terrifying ones is that this continuing Resolution allows RFK Junior to eliminate funding for the universal flu vaccine. Yeah.

I was talking to someone in a medical profession about this, Like there's a serious chance that is won't be h one developed in the US for next year and it will just use the European one. Great stuff.

You know, this is really the substantive problem with this entire thing and why it is genuinely an act of like an act an act of collaboration worthy Avichy France to fucking pass this, to pass this fucking bill. Is that again, you are handing control of the budgets, right, You're handing direct control of just like how budget allocation stuff gets fucking dealt with to like Elon Musk, Trump and RFK Junior, and they can just fucking do this shit with it.

Yeah, we've already seen some of this, like manipulation of federal government funding, like with with Columbia University.

Oh, we're gonna get to that.

Yeah, okay, good exciting.

Yeah, So other things. It defunds FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund, which is bad because a bunch of funding with FEMA Disaster Relief Fund has been get this exhausted because there were a bunch of fucking disasters. Guess what, there's going to be more of disasters. Guess what, There's not going to be money in ease the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund.

Yeah that's bad. Yeah.

And here's the thing. We have not fucking hit the worst part of this continuing resolution yet, like all of that, right, like the monopolization of power in the hands of the executive, you know, like the potentiality funding of the flu vaccine. We have not hit rock body yet. Bottom is this getting resolution quote slashes one hundred and eighty five million dollars seven percent of the total program from defense nuclear non proliferation programs, including the programs to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear and radioactive material, remove radioactive materials at risk of being misused or causing a catastrophic accident and a tur and monitor foreign nuclear fuel cycle in weapons developments, nuclear materials movement or diversions, and nuclear explosions. Cool. So we are defunding the nuke police again for a third time. And this one looks like it's actually gonna fucking stick because I don't think any of these fucking people actually understand what the defense nuclear non proliferation programs do.

Yeah, I mean I don't know, because they will on one about Iran and enriching uranium for years. Have they have they just give? Have they moved on? Well?

Like this as as we're going to see in a second, this budget is being written by just fucking clowns, like just absolute dipshits. Don't I don't know who the fuck is doing this.

That's what I sometimes wonder is, like, who comes up with these numbers?

Like it's like a staffers, it's literally an army of staffords. Yeah, the senators re voting for these bills most often have no idea what the fuck is in them. It's all run by an army of staffers. And the thing about it all being run by an army of staffers, and the fact that Republican staffers are increasingly drawn from a class of like genuinely the most unhinged people who have ever lived, this class of fucking internet gropers and fucking white nationalist bullshit, means that one of the parts of this I think people have heard about is the one billion dollars in spending that was cut just from like the city budget of Washington, DC. Now, looking at what's happened next, I genuinely think they did this by accidents. That's been the explanation that's been given is that they literally did it by accidents. And the reason I think it might actually be true, it's it's either it's either actually true or they saw the pushback. But immediately after this bill got passed, there was like a separate bill that was drafted to restore the funding, and that was approvinguanimously by the second so it might legitimately have been a mistake. So it was either legitimately a mistake or all of these people realized that the entire population of DC was about to like fucking march on the capital of Pitchforks. So I don't know one of those two things. So we're not talking much about the DC stuff because it seems like the funding is going to come back, though if it doesn't well cover the catastrophic impacts of that. And there's one more thing, James, which I couldn't find details of, but one of the things it's supposed to do is eliminate protections for people an immigration court. Fantastic, great allowed the Attorney general more power.

Yeah, I was just looking this up. Actually, Like, let me there was an office founded under Biden that was the Office of the Obficely Immigration Detents from Ombudsman, which was like supposedly to exist to like examine people's conditions in immigration detention, right, And I'm wondering to what extent it still exists. Yeah, Like I don't know. I was just trying to find that out, I would have to go through the risk, and maybe I will at some point. But yeah, there is stuff that the federal government does right now that provides people with some protections in immigration courts, right, and yeah, I can see, I mean look to the extent that that matters, because they're just deporting people in open violation of court orders right now, we don't know. But it's still bad either way, right, taking away the very few protections that might have. Yeah, it's bad.

Yeah, So speaking of bad things, we're going to go to ads and then we're going.

To come back.

We are back.

So, having said all of this about this bill, fully, ten Democratic senators voted to avoid shutting down the government and fucking past this unbelievably hideous resolution which again like defunds the nuke police. Again, they are risking like global annihilation by doing this. And I'm just going to read out the names of everyone who did this, because there's been a lot of focus on Chuck Schumer, and Chuck Schumer is to like probably the primary person responsible for this, but fuck every single one of these people.

And he's a quizzling in this scenario, like the Capitol Q quisling.

Yes, yes, okay, so Chuck Schumer, Catherine Cortes, mosto Dick Durbin, which is actually a surprising one because Durbin suburban's about to retire. He he was my old senator in Illinois. I actually know he wasn't wow a complicated I actually fucking don't remember the which one of them I had. Uh, But Durbin is, you know, he's like senior party leadership guy. He's usually been in like the kind of left I guess of the like old Democratic leadership yea, which is not very far left. But he fucking voted for this. John Fetterman, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Kirsten Gillibrand, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Yeah, thank you his song. Agnes King, Gary Peters, Brian Shatz, and Janine Shaheen now notably missing from that list. Tim fucking Kine voted against this. Do you know how bad a Republican budget thing has to be for Tim fucking kin to vote against it and be like, hey, guys, what the fuck are you doing?

Yeah? And the thing is like, as a Democrat, the move, just if you want to get reelected is to vote against it and then blame them for everything bad that happens this year because of the budget thing, right, if you have no moral backbone whatsoever. And I'm sure like that there are things in this continuing Resolution which really screw over rural areas, right, like some of the funding that was allocated. Oh yeah, And like Cain is at least, I guess astute enough to see that when things get harder of his constituents, he can go, yes, they did this, and I voted against it, and you need to return me to office so I can continue opposing this shit, which is a very cynical approach.

Yeah.

And then yeah, we've just got Chuck Chuck Humor who just kind of bowed down and kissed their ring.

Yeah, and you know, the response to this is staggering. I genuinely I have never seen anything like the kind of anger I'm seeing it. I I've seen that Schuber for the past few days. This has happened Friday. Like Indivisible, which is like a pretty so Indivisible is like a sort of NGO thing that that's like a like tries to get's like a sort of vaguely progressive thing and tries to get people to vote for the Democrats.

Yeah, and like register voters and stuff.

Yeah, And they've been getting into fights with the Democratic leadership because they keep telling people to call their senators to tell them to oppose bills and or nominations. The Democrats are like, we don't want to oppose bills.

In twenty twenty, in mobilizing the vote in territory, for instance, like an indivisible to Hana played a really important role, So like they're not negligible in their power.

No, Yeah, and like they are calling for primary Chuck Schubert. Yeah, our slash neoliberal is calling for AOC the primary Chuck Schumer. Do you know how fucked things have to be.

For ar slash neoliberal to be backing AOC against Chuck Schumer? Like fucking near a tandin is Agrey with Bertie Sanders.

Criticizing Schumer for voting for this bill, Like this is.

Like, I I don't know, I think there maybe there are probably are people in the audience here who's like weren't paying attention enough or like don't remember, or like weren't old enough to be around for like like the Bernie Wars.

But this is like every faction on every side of like the whole series of fights from like twenty fifteen and like Bernie's first thing through twenty twenty, even like the mid late twenty twenties, Like all of these people were on exactly polar opposite side. They fucking hated each other, and they're all like coming together specifically to agree on a fuck Chuck Schumer camping to the point where like again like ar Slas neoliberal and like Nearer Tangent who are like have been just absolute stalwarts the part right for ages are like are backing AOC primary ing Chuck Schumer.

Yeah, it's a total cultural victory for the Bernie bros. Is what's happening. It's a Democratic party.

Well, and again the Chuck Schubber is the head of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate.

Yeah, minority leader of the United States Senate.

Yeah he is, you know, he is unbeliefably powerful, and I mean, like the people criticizing him. He got criticized. There was a joint statement on funding bill in the Senate from the Democratic minority leader in the fucking House, Hakim Jeffries, and the Democratic whip Kathleen Clark, and the caucus chair Peri Agular and like Hawkim Jeffries is as ferociously anti socialist of a politician as there exists in all of Congress. He is like implacably hostile to even like the most like barest progressive things whatsoever. He is just staggeringly opposed to. And they released a joint statement against this. Right a sort of happening here, and it's happening fucking too late to stop anything. But what's happening here is like we are genuinely starting to get a kind of and and I'm seeing this sort of online. We've been I think we've been seeing the sort of echoes of it is like, but there's a kind of realignment happening among you know, obviously this has been being opposed by people outside the Democratic Party and by a lot of the Democratic Party's base for ages right and the Democratic Party's base, and also just like people who don't want to get be ruled by fascist forever have had, you know, incredibly staunch opposition to all of the collaborationist investment happening. But what's happening right now is that like the actual like inside of the Democratic Party, there was a fucking rupture happening. And inside of the people who are like, you know, like inside of the politic coast, there was a rupture happening between people who are collaborationists and people who'd like want to be less collaborationist. And this is to the point where like Nancy Pelosi came out against this. Yeah, And the reason they're doing this is because a lot of these people are fucking terrified because they are looking at a couple of things. One, they're looking at what the Trump gistration is doing, and they're going, holy shit, Like near A Tandon is looking at them fucking just black bagging, just like just fucking black bagging Mamu Khalil and is going like, holy shit, we are maybe about I mean, it's maybe eight steps away from that happening to be, but that's eight steps that you can fucking like, that's a path you can walk down. And this is also these people that are realizing just the unbelievable anger among just like regular what you would call sort of like regular liberals who aren't like, like you vote for the Democrats, but if you aren't, like.

Yeah, they're not like on Twitter with a blue wave emotion.

But the thing is, even the people on Twitter with a blue wave emoji and again, like the rich last neoliberal people are like the most ideologically committed of all of these people, right, Like even the most unhinged nerds who are like obsessed with like individual house races and like very very specific, weird technical policy stuff that allows them to justify supporting all these unhinged policies, even those people are learning on them. And the reason this is all happening, and I think this is a very very important thing to understand about the entire political landscape going forward, is that one of the core, an extremely important basis of Donald Trump's support is in the leadership of the Democratic Party, particularly the Democratic Party in New York, Right Schumer, this is Eric Adams. This is also increasingly becoming true of people like Gavin Newsom and a lot of the sort of Democrats out of the Bay to some extent, and you know, and you can you can see this is sort of various border states too, where you know, these people fundamentally are doing this because they fucking agree with him. That's why why, that's why they're fucking collaborating.

Yeah, or at the very least, like and perhaps it's in a sense worse that they don't agree with him, but they don't care enough to not like they're doing it because they think they can personally benefit.

No, I don't think that's true. And my evidence for why I don't think that's true is I'm going to read some stuff from the New York Times interview that David Chuck Schumer right after he did this. Okay, So in this interview with the New York Times, he gets asked about Trump cutting four hundred million dollars of funding for Columbia University for I guess not like publicly executing the Palestine protesters. And again, yeah, Columbia University. That is an institution that he represents in the Senate, right, Yeah, Like that's like his that's like his fucking thing. And his response was, well, obviously they didn't crush the campus protest hard enough, but cutting four hundred million dollars spending might hurt students who didn't protest, like maybe, And he's not even clear about that, right, So if you read between the lines of what he's saying, his arguments is that it's actually fine for Trump to do all of these fucking budget cuts of all of these people from these universities as long as it's specifically targeting pro Palestinian protesters, which is ednyone who's vaguely pro Palestign And he also gets you know, he gets asked about the Trump administration just straight a black bagging about mu Khalil, and he says, quote, I don't know all the details yet. They're trying to come out and there'll be a court case which will determine it. If he broke the law, he should be deported. If he didn't break the law on which and just peacefully protested, he should not be deported. It's plain and simple.

I mean, how is it hard to not make an a quivocating statement on that.

No, because he agrees with it. He thinks it's fine. He thinks it's fine. The Trump administration fucking black bagged this guy, like again, who is who it was? A permanent US resident. He thinks that it is okay. That here's the thing, he's not even disagreeing with the actual literal black bagging. And I want to point this out, like even if Amu Khalil like legally committed a crime, like that's not a fucking deportation thing.

Yeah, the section of the United States they're using to justify deporting him is not one that has been used before. This is not he did not do a felony, and they're not suggesting that he did do a fellas And like if Schuma can't find it in himself to condemn that, like yeah, like folks need to move on because.

He because he agrees with it. Like that's the thing, Like, yeah, what he is saying here is that he agrees that if a permanent legal US resident commits any crime.

Well doesn't though he's not an accused, he's not accused of a crime, like he's he no, no, that's that's no. But this is specifically what Humor says. Schumer said, quote, if he broke the law, he should be deported. What his stance is is that if someone who is a permanent US resident breaks the law while at a palaestimee protest, even if it is a misdemeanor, even if it is fucking jaywalking.

That they should be deported. That is the Trump administration line. Like that is it is slightly less than Trump administration line, but that is that is a genuinely fascist political line. She just straight up agrees with the administration. He is a slight matter of degree like off from them, but like he's he just like he's collaborating because he fucking agrees with them, and he agrees with them both on on the fact that the state should be used to destroy anyone who supports Palestine, and she agrees with them on the fucking deportation ship. Because you know, this was one of the other things that Democrats have fundamentally aligned with Trump on since twenty twenty is that fundamentally, like they agree that we need more immigration controls and we need to do more border violence. You can see the evidence of this from when they fucking passed that just unhinged fascist bill to do allow border state of emergencies.

Yeah, and there's stuff that they proposed and didn't pass because they were Republican twenty to kill it and then Biden executive order banning asylum. Like I think what it comes down to is that for the Democrats, the existence of people who oppose the genocide in Palestine and the existence of migrants is seen as inconvenient, and they're prepared to do away with any rights so as people might have and even do away with those people rather than engage with them in any way. Right, they I'm sure people like Schuma continue to blame people from both of those move moments for their ass whooping that they took at the polls in twenty twenty four because they decided that it was more important to do genocide than it was to listen to those in this country and rather than listening now they're blaming them. And the only logical way for them to go is right, and the only logical place for them to take it is more state violence. Right.

Yeah. But there's another aspect of this too, which the thing I want to close on, which is okay, So, why have the Democrats been shifting so far to the right since twenty twenty right and s particularly since after twenty twenty two when they needed to sort of win it contest NAT for election. And the answer is that after twenty twenty, all of their politics became about opposing the uprising because they you know, there was a period dream the uprising where they were scared enough that like you get like the cant cloth shit, and they're like, you know, and they're talking about like and Biden like runs on a significantly more left wing platform than like Kamala Harris did, right, Yeah, because of the particularly because of the pressure of those protons. Now, obviously, like presidential platforms just lies, right but.

Right, yeah, it's just as you need to tell to get the votes.

Yeah yeah. But on the other hand, the fundamental politics of the Democratic Party in the last half a decade has been opposed to the uprising. It's the thing that's, you know, behind all of their turn to tough on crime politics. It's the thing behind their their sort of anti immigrant politics, the thing behind the turns they've been taking on trans politics. And the problem with this particularly like the anti black, anti crime shit and the anti immigrant stuff you know who else. His entire politics like came into the fucking political sphere as the right wing reaction to the uprising. Oh wait, Donald Trump. Donald Trump walked down the fucking escalator in twenty fifteen, immediately in the wake of the giant uprisings in Baltimore in twenty fifteen, which I think people have sort of memory holds, like Ferguson and Baltimore. He like, it's like right after Baltimore that Trump fucking comes down the escalator and people forget how fundamentally the right wing reaction to those protests deranged people who even the Tea Party hadn't pushed like far enough to for Donald Trump. It was like it was a reaction to this.

Yeah, that's when we saw the oath Keepers for the first time as well. Like this kind of militant right really grew dramatically in response to that.

Yeah, And this is the sort of fundamental thing that's going on, is that there's now an entire class of people who are running the Democratic Party, right. This is this is a fucking Chuck Schumer. He is, like, I mean, quite possibly the most powerful Democrat in the country, and he is just straight up a collaborationist.

Yeah, it might legit become that like AOC is more powerful than Chuck Schumer in the next few weeks, you know, he is that the reaction against Chuck Schumer from establishment Democrats is stronger than anything I've ever seen from them.

He lost Seth Moulton, which I didn't even think was possible. Yeah, but I think there's there's one more important note to sort of say, shure, which is that, like, you know, the response to this that I've largely been seeing is everyone going, Okay, we need a primary to these people. Okay, are you looking at the rate at which stuff is happening in this country, Like, you do you think that we are going to be able to wait until the fucking primaries?

Yeah, six years the cases, right.

Yeah, until we can like attempt to fucking do shit here, Like absolutely not. No, they were like there literally is regardless of what you think about electoralism as a strategy, there is literally not time to wait until the next election cycle. Like again, they have defunded the nuke police for the third time. So the opposition to this isn't going to come from inside of the electoral system because again, the demercrats are being run by collaborators and there's not enough time to fucking oust them. So if you if you want this to not continue, you were going to You're going to have to find ways to do organizing outside of that system. We have approximately one million episodes about this. You can also go back to my you already know how to organize episode.

But yeah, look, call your centator if you want to. But if that's the net total of your political activity, then like right now, it's probably not going to make a difference in time, and really consider it. It's the most useful use of your time. Yeah, and maybe make some beans or sow something nicer one instead. Oh as well, you could listen to it while you sew something nice. You could call them while you're cooking your beans.

Hell yeah, well this has been It could happen here? Yeah, down with the collaborationists, Yeah, fuck.

Them, Yeah, absolutely fucking choke in particular, It.

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