Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday rebuffed a recent critique from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about his decision to support the Republican-backed stopgap spending bill, saying he had no choice but to avert a government shutdown.

“What we got, at the end of the day, is avoiding the horror of a shutdown,” Schumer said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to host Kristen Welker. There was no leverage point that we could’ve — we could’ve asked for things, they just would’ve said no.”

Pelosi — a longtime ally of Schumer — had taken aim at the minority leader’s move last week, accusing him of giving ground to Republicans without demanding anything in return. “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” she said.

Schumer and a small group of other Democrats’ decision to vote in favor of the continuing resolution has sparked backlash from members of their party who argue Democrats capitulated on key priorities. Schumer, however, has held firm, repeatedly asserting that a shutdown would have handed President Donald Trump and his allies an opening to continue gutting the federal bureaucracy.

Schumer’s decision to support the GOP bill drew praise from Trump, who said Schumer had “guts” and “did the right thing.”

Despite the clash, Pelosi said she continues to support Schumer — a stance that contrasts with growing murmurs within the Democratic Party about whether Schumer should step down from his leadership role.

Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet recently declined to explicitly call for Schumer to step aside as Senate minority leader, but highlighted echoes of the party’s internal struggle last summer over former President Joe Biden’s candidacy. But Schumer pushed back on the comparison when asked if he thought he could be making a similar mistake.

“No, absolutely not,” he said. “I did this out of conviction.”

He doubled down on his decision to support Republicans’ spending bill, saying, “Look, I’m not stepping down.”

ALBANY, New York — Gov. Kathy Hochul’s lifelong obsession with Harriet Tubman is propelling an effort to place a statue of the 19th century abolitionist in the U.S. Capitol.

The push to put Tubman’s marble likeness in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall is also being backed by both the state Senate and Assembly, which support the governor’s plan to swap out a statue of founding father Robert Livingston.

There are 100 statues in Statuary Hall — two for each state. The planned switch to Tubman would be the first change in one of New York’s spots since the likenesses of Livingston and George Clinton were shipped to Washington in the 1870s.

Hochul has been as big a booster of Tubman as anybody. Last year, she told a group of elementary school students about her childhood fascination with the Union Army spy.

“When I was in third grade, I had this one favorite book. It was called ‘The Story of Harriet Tubman,’” Hochul said. “It was a book I used to check out of the library all the time. I didn’t own it. I checked it out so much, the librarian one day said, ‘Why don’t you just keep it?’ And what I’d do is, late at night, my parents said, ‘Turn the lights out,’ it was dark in my room, I crept out of bed and I’d go grab that book. And I read it over and over and over because I could not get over how courageous she was.”

Seventeen statutes have been removed from Statuary Hall since 2003, most of whom were Confederates or their sympathizers. Democrats in the House have twice passed a bill in recent years to ban such statues. And while this has yet to win approval from the Senate, other efforts to remove sculptures that have faced criticism have been successful — including North Carolina’s Republican-backed push to replace segregationist Charles Brantley Aycock with Billy Graham last year.

Hochul has made at least four official visits to Tubman’s historic home in Auburn since she became lieutenant governor a decade ago. She renamed one of the boats the state uses on the Erie Canal after Tubman in 2022. And she announced in 2023 that the state would spend $400,000 to add a Tubman statute to Binghamton — which is set to be unveiled this Friday.

Livingston spent 24 years as New York’s first chancellor — a post that made him the top judge in the state, but which also had some powers currently held by the governor. His tenure overlapped with a stint as the first American to hold the job that evolved into secretary of state. He later served as Thomas Jefferson’s ambassador to France and negotiated the Louisiana Purchase.

But his historical standing has been marred by the fact that he owned more than a dozen slaves.

Livingston was never a consensus choice for a statue. As the Legislature began debating the honorees in 1872, steamboat inventor Robert Fulton seemed like the early frontrunner to join Clinton.

Hochul’s proposal, which was buried in her budget and has since been included in both chamber’s one-house budget bills, would create a five-member commission tasked with selecting a Tubman statute. The governor would then be tasked with working with the Architect of the Capitol to finalize plans.

“One of the architects of the Underground Railroad, one of the folks who has redefined who we are as a human,” said Sen. Jamaal Bailey — who’s sponsoring a bill to make Harriet Tubman Day a state holiday — about why the abolitionist is deserving of the historical honor.

“From a human perspective, not just a Black perspective — and I think it’s great, as a Black person in New York state, for her to have this recognition — I think it’s very important for us to do,” Bailey said.

While Livingston might be removed from Washington, his likeness will live on. Two exact replicas were made when his statue was finalized in 1875. One of them still stands prominently at the western end of the state Senate’s lobby in New York’s Capitol building.

Michael Bennet stopped short of calling for Chuck Schumer to step aside as Senate Democrats’ leader — though he pointedly compared the situation to the party’s internal strife over then-President Joe Biden serving as the party’s nominee last summer.

“On the leadership question, it’s always better to examine whether folks are in the right place, and we’re certainly going to have that conversation,” the Coloradoan said in a town hall in Golden, Colorado, Wednesday evening.

Bennet sidestepped a question about whether he would call for Schumer to step down, referencing the end of Biden’s disastrous 2024 election bid where the president ultimately stepped aside after growing agitation from other elected Democrats.

“In dodging your question, let me just say: It’s important for people to know when it’s time to go, and I think in the case of Joe Biden, and we’re going to have conversations I’m sure in the foreseeable future, about all the Democratic leadership,” he said.

Bennet’s statement comes almost a week after Schumer backed a GOP funding bill that most of his caucus voted against.

Bennet — a one-time 2020 presidential candidate — was one of the earliest Senate Democrats to publicly grapple with Biden’s position at the top of the ticket in 2024. He has publicly expressed interest in a potential run for Colorado governor next year.

Schumer has since faced intense scrutiny from his party — and particularly members of the House — but has repeatedly contended the move was necessary to stave off a government shutdown that he believes would have allowed President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to accelerate their crusade to hollow out federal agencies.

That, he has said, could also shunt critical public services like food benefits or mass transit funding.

“I’m a smart politician, I can read what people want,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Tuesday night. But Republicans, he continued, put forward a “terrible, terrible, bill,” and a shutdown would have been “so much worse.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said at a town hall earlier this week that Schumer “was wrong,” WBUR reported, but otherwise did not address if he should remain leader.

Much of this resentment is concentrated among House Democrats, who were largely united in voting against the GOP bill. Senate Democrats have largely held their tongues.

Earlier this week, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — a longtime partner of Schumer’s — added to the fire, saying, “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing. … I think that’s what happened the other day.”

James Blair: White House ‘not bashful’ about pushing Trump agenda

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House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan said he plans to hold hearings on recent judicial rulings against the Trump administration’s agenda, after President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and conservatives have called for impeaching federal judges.

James Boasberg, the chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., had ruled that Trump must stop the deportation flights of Venezuelan migrants, a move that prompted swift backlash from the president’s base. Shortly after Trump called for the House to start proceedings to remove Boasberg on Tuesday, Texas Rep. Brandon Gill filed articles of impeachment against him. Other Republicans quickly signed on.

In a CNN interview Wednesday, Jordan indicated the first hearing on Boasberg’s and other judges’ decisions could come as early as next week. The Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over judicial impeachments.

“We’re gonna hold hearings on this entire issue,” the Ohio Republican said. “The 15 injunctions that have been done in an eight-week time frame, Judge Boasberg’s decision. We plan on holding hearings — hearing from experts talking about this whole kind of body of law, this whole situation.”

Any judicial impeachment measures are unlikely to be successful, even if Jordan pursues the issue. Republicans have an incredibly thin majority in the House, and Speaker Mike Johnson does not have the votes to impeach any judges at this point.

Jordan emphasized that “everything is on the table” and floated that there might be another “legislative remedy” beyond judicial impeachments. He did not specify further.

Jordan added that he had not yet spoken to Trump about the issue but had plans to speak with the president later this week.

President Donald Trump wants Congress to repair a significant cut to the District of Columbia’s budget and is happy to leave the procedural details to Speaker Mike Johnson, according to two White House officials.

But the president is prepared to work the phones — or, if needed, fire off a social media post — to correct legislative language that could have major repercussions for the capital city if left unaddressed.

Last Friday, the Senate passed a Trump-endorsed bill that would restore as much as $1.1 billion in local funding, according to District officials, that was — inadvertently, by some accounts — slashed by the government spending measure signed into law the next day.

The president has confidence the speaker will bring the bipartisan measure up for a vote, said a White House official granted anonymity to discuss Trump’s thinking.

How the bill gets through the House, however, is “sausage-making in the background,” said the official. “I don’t think he’ll publicly call for Johnson to bring [the fix] to the floor — that’s going to be a behind-the-scenes thing. If [Trump] must, though, a pressure campaign from Truth Social is always a possibility.”

If need be, Trump also is open to making calls to individual House members to ensure their support for the budget fix: “The president has no problem using his phone to make sure members get on board with what he’s trying to do.”

A second White House official, also granted anonymity to share private conversations, described the District of Columbia cut in the funding bill as “an oversight” that would eventually be fixed. That official said the White House wasn’t pressuring House GOP leaders and was giving Johnson space to figure out the way forward.

But Trump could, at some point, grow impatient: part of his interest in getting the budget fix approved is about extending an olive branch to Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, one of the White House officials said.

While Bowser has pushed back on the threat to the city’s budget, she has mostly spoken respectfully about Trump and has recently taken steps to comply with GOP priorities for the city — for instance, dismantling the “Black Lives Matter Plaza” her administration set up near the White House amid the 2020 racial justice protests.

She so far has been viewed by the White House as a “good actor” in the endeavor to get the budget fix enacted, according to the official.

Still, congressional Republicans note the city won’t run out of money in the meantime; they also argue the shortfall is closer to $500 million, not $1.1 billion. In any case, local elected officials and their allies say a failure to enact the repair bill would effectively force the District of Columbia to make dramatic mid-fiscal-year cuts to law enforcement, infrastructure improvement efforts and public education.

As House Republicans worked to advance a seven-month funding bill to avert a government shutdown last week, GOP leadership did not include routine language allowing the District to continue spending its local budget dollars. And while leaders made several changes to the bill text just before bringing it to the House floor for a vote, they didn’t address Washington’s funding omission.

It caught many senior lawmakers off guard.

“It came as a surprise to me and explains why the mayor has called me,” Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins of Maine said in an interview. “It certainly wasn’t something we did.”

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) at first told reporters he thought the omission was to rescind funding for “a lot of inaugural stuff,” saying “we’re not leaving inauguration funding going to D.C. in a bill when there’s not an inauguration.”

He later acknowledged that not all the slashed funding fell under that inauguration category, but he declined to address it, saying he’d have to “look at it in more detail” and that “it’s actually in the weeds.”

Many facets of the District of Columbia are subject to congressional oversight, but most of the city’s $21.2 billion budget is funded by local taxpayers. Roughly $5 billion comes from the federal government — the vast majority through formula-based federal programs, such as Medicaid, similar to what states receive.

Johnson now has to figure out when and how to bring the bill up for a floor vote amid opposition from hard-liners in his rebellious conference. GOP leaders feel like they have some time to figure out the way forward.

The speaker is not currently planning to advance the bill Monday through the Rules Committee, which would pave the way for a floor vote requiring a simple majority that could splinter Republicans on a procedural motion needed to bring the measure forward. Most likely, Johnson will need to pursue an expedited floor maneuver in the coming weeks that requires a two-thirds majority vote to secure passage.

Outside pressure — not just from Trump — could continue to build. City residents gathered outside the tiny House Rules Committee room for its initial meeting to set parameters for floor debate on the stopgap funding bill, raising alarms and objections to lawmakers about the consequences of the cuts.