Chuck Schumer

Chuck Schumer (born Charles Ellis Schumer on November 23, 1950) is an American Democratic politician, the senior United States senator from New York and the current Senate minority leader.

A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he served three terms in the New York State Assembly from 1975 to 1980 and nine terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1981 to 1999, during which redistricting changed his district several times. In 1998 he won election to the Senate by defeating three-term Republican incumbent Al D'Amato, and he was re-elected in 2004, 2010, 2016 and 2022.

In the Senate he chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from 2005 to 2009, a stretch in which Democrats picked up a combined 14 seats in the 2006 and 2008 elections. He was vice chair of the Democratic Caucus from 2007 to 2017 and also chaired the Senate Democratic Policy Committee from 2011 to 2017. After winning re-election in 2016, he was chosen to succeed the retiring Harry Reid as Senate Democratic leader.

In January 2021 he became Senate majority leader, the first Jewish Senate leader in U.S. history. He guided several major Biden administration bills through the Senate, among them the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Under his leadership the Senate confirmed more federal judges in a president's first two years than in any presidency since John F. Kennedy's, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first African American woman on the Supreme Court.