Far-left group 50501 demands Dems ditch Schumer, install Chris Van Hollen to lead in the Senate

“The American people deserve to hear how the next Senate leader will fight for them,” the group wrote on Facebook and other platforms.

The 50501 organization had its origins in a Reddit post that said “50 states. 50 protests. 1 movement.” It played a lead role in coordinating the “No Kings” protests. However, its grassroots origins were soon eclipsed by a network of existing groups linked to shadowy non-governmental organizations funded by oligarchs like the Soros family, Reid Hoffman, and Neville Roy Singham.

The endorsement of Van Hollen’s leadership challenge appeared to be part of the opening salvo in an intraparty civil war as Democrats — fresh from sweeping the midterm elections and positioning themselves to enact changes that would help assure permanent electoral majorities — risk seeing their lust for power prove to be their undoing.

Almost immediately in the aftermath of the so-called blue tsunami on Nov. 3, radical leftists who have reluctantly allied themselves with the party’s establishment arm began clamoring for Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries to step aside, largely due to their support for Israel and the influential lobbying group AIPAC.

However, some have seen Schumer as too much of a pushover since he capitulated on a budget agreement early in President Donald Trump’s second term that sought to avoid a protracted government shutdown. Schumer later caved to the demands of his radical base by enacting two of the longest congressional shutdowns in US history over the administration’s funding of federal immigration enforcement.

“Schumer’s second massive capitulation to the Trump regime has shown Trump that he can continue to plow forward with his authoritarian agenda without meaningful opposition from Congress,” the fringe-left group Indivisible wrote. “It’s shown him that inflicting pain on Americans helps him achieve his agenda.”

Van Hollen, a relative unknown who was first elected to the Senate in 2016, previously chaired Senate Democrats’ fundraising arm, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, but has relatively limited leadership experience otherwise. However, he appears willing to let the far-left voices in Congress have a voice. While he rejected certain aspects of the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform, including getting rid of jails and the US Senate entirely, Van Hollen said that the conversation in the Democratic Party should still include “all the voices.”

Van Hollen has also rocketed into relevance after pledging to end the filibuster — something current Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune adamantly refused to do, even at the risk of failing to pass a key election-integrity bill, the SAVE Act, which may have cost Republicans their majority.

“My personal view has been all along that the filibuster is an anti-democratic — small ‘d’ — provision,” Van Hollen said Friday. “It’s not in our Constitution. It was put in there by senators to enhance their power over the power of the people.”

The longstanding Senate tradition was created in 1806 as the accidental result of a Senate rules change. It has since evolved to require at least 60 votes overall to push a bill out of debate and into voting. The last time a single party held a filibuster-proof supermajority was 2008-2010, in the early years of the Obama administration.

Since the Trump era, parties that once used the rule to encourage debate and compromise have calcified, making it a tool for blocking the agenda of the party in power. Democrats and Republicans have both toyed with abolishing it in past cycles where they held the majority, only to become its staunchest defenders upon losing power.