Charles Schumer

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Charles Ellis "Chuck" Schumer (born November 23, 1950) is an American politician. He is currently the senior Senator from the state of New York, serving since 1999. A Democrat, in 2005 he became chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

1 Early life
2 Private life
3 State Assemblyman
4 United States Representative
5 United States Senator
6 Electoral history
7 1998 NYS Democratic Ticket
8 External links

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Early life

Schumer was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, where he still lives today. He attended public schools in Brooklyn, scoring a 1600 on the SAT, and graduating as the valedictorian from James Madison High School in 1967.

He continued his education at Harvard College, where he became interested in politics and campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968. After graduating he went to Harvard Law School. He graduated from there in 1974.

Schumer passed the New York State Bar Exam in early 1975, but never practiced law. Instead he entered politics.

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Private life

Schumer and his wife, Iris Weinshall, have two daughters. Weinshall is the New York City Commissioner of Transportation [1].

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State Assemblyman

The same year he graduated from Harvard Law, 1974, he ran for and was elected to the New York State Assembly, becoming at age 23 the youngest member of the New York legislature since Theodore Roosevelt. He served three terms. [2] In the decades since, he has never lost an election, and has never held any job outside of elected office.

In 1980, 16th District Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman won the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat of Republican Jacob Javits. Schumer ran for Holtzman's vacated House seat and won.

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United States Representative

He was reelected eight times from the Brooklyn and Queens-based district, which changed numbers three times in his tenure (it was numbered the 16th from 1981-83, the 10th from 1983-93 and the 9th from 1993).

In 1998, he won the Democratic Senate primary against Mark Green and Geraldine Ferraro. He then defeated three-term incumbent Republican Al D'Amato, who had defeated Holtzman in 1980. In 2004, Schumer handily won re-election against Republican Assemblyman Howard Mills of Middletown and Conservative Marilyn O'Grady. Schumer outpolled Mills, the second-place finisher, by 2.8 million votes and won reelection with 71% of the vote, the most lopsided margin ever for a statewide election in New York. Schumer won every county in the state except one, Hamilton County in the Adirondacks, the least populated and most Republican county in the state.

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United States Senator

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Schumer currently serves on the following Congressional committees:

While serving in the House of Representatives, Schumer coauthored the federal assault weapons ban in 1994 with California Senator Dianne Feinstein, which expired in 2004. The National Rifle Association and other gun groups (see gun politics) have criticized him for allegedly not knowing much about guns, pointing to various errors regarding the subject. Supporters of gun control legislation, however, give him much of the credit for passage of both the semi-automatics ban and the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act despite intense lobbying from opponents. The ban on semi-automatic firearms expired in September, 2004 despite attempts by Senator Schumer to extend it.

In addition to gun restriction, Schumer has focused on banking and consumer issues, counter-terrorism, and debate over confirmation of federal judges, as well as economic development in New York.

On foreign policy, Schumer was and remains a supporter of the Iraq War Resolution, although he has since become a critic of President Bush's strategy in the Iraq War suggesting that a commission of ex-generals be appointed to review it. [3]

Schumer is currently the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, part of the Democratic Senate Leadership, with primary responsibility for raising funds and recruiting candidates for the Democrats in the 2006 Senate election. When he took this post, he announced that he would not run for Governor of New York in 2006, as many had speculated he would. This step avoided a potentially divisive gubernatorial primary election in 2006 between Schumer and Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general.

A small controversy erupted in September 2005, when two staff employees of the DSCC illegally obtained a copy of the credit report of the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, Michael Steele, a Republican senatorial candidate, posing as him and using his social security number. Upon learning this, the committee's executive director notified the U.S. attorney's office, and suspended the involved staffers. They are currently under investigation by the FBI. Schumer has not been implicated in the incident, and a spokesperson for the DSCC has said, "Chuck's only involvement was to report this matter to the authorities immediately after first learning about it." [4]

Schumer has recently been criticized by video game players for siding with Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut), promoting regulation of video games. He is known to attack Eidos Interactive for the game 25 to Life, urging Sony Computer Entertainment and Microsoft to end their license agreements with Eidos Interactive.

Schumer's propensity for publicity is the subject of a running joke amongst many commentators, leading Bob Dole to quip that "the most dangerous place in Washington is between Charles Schumer and a television camera." Schumer frequently schedules media appearances on Sundays, a slow day for news, in the hope of getting television coverage, typically on subjects other than legislative matters. [5] [6] [7]

In his role as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Schumer encouraged Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett to run for the US Senate in Ohio with a good faith promise, according to Hackett, that he would "have no financial concerns." [8] However, Schumer ultimately shared his view with top Democratic fundraisers that they should focus their resources on another candidate, Representative Sherrod Brown, whom Democratic pollsters believed would have broader general election appeal with Ohio voters. Subsequently, Paul Hackett decided to drop out of the race, and refuses to re-run against Jean Schmidt, to whom he narrowly lost the 2005 special election in a traditionaly Republican district.

In 2006, Schumer led a bipartisan effort, with the help of Republicans like Congressman Peter King (NY), to stop a deal approved by the Bush administration to transfer control of six United States ports to a corporation owned by the government of United Arab Emirates (UAE), Dubai Ports World. The 9/11 Commission reported that despite recent alliances with the U.S., the UAE had strong ties to Osama bin Laden and Al Quaeda prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks on World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The measure in the House was H.R 4807, and in the Senate, S. 2333; these were introduced to require a 45 day review of this transfer of ownership. On March 9, 2006 Dubai Ports World withdrew its application to operate the port.

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