I think mostly it is revealing about Schumer’s priorities. He has a government job. If everything within the buildings in Washington DC is mostly still working the way it’s supposed to, then at the end of the day he still gets a paycheck and some important stuff to do every day. Lots of people across the US going through upheaval, losing their jobs, maybe getting detained indefinitely or not, journalists getting threatened, all that stuff isn’t, like, good, but it’s also not an existential threat to him. The government shutting down would be.

And so, avoiding that is a key priority of his. It’s urgent. All that other stuff is not.