The Senate Caves

Every Democrat in the Senate likes to imagine himself as a friend of the middle class. But few take the delusion to the extremes of Chuck Schumer. In his book Positively American, the senator from New York writes in eerie detail of his decades-long, entirely imaginary friendship with Joe and Eileen Bailey, a nonexistent middle-class couple from Long Island who struggle to get by on $75,000 a year. So committed is Schumer to his phantom friends that he has even introduced them to Majority Leader Harry Reid, confessing that he speaks to them daily and would be consulting them on every decision he makes as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

"Chuck," Reid told him, "I wouldn't want it any other way."

But Schumer's love of his made-up friends in the middle class didn't stop him from championing one of the biggest tax breaks for billionaires in the history of the republic. Last year, Democrats in the House fought to close a loophole that levies a tax rate of only 15 percent — barely half what real-life versions of the Baileys pay — on hedge-fund managers who make as much as $3.7 billion a year. But when the debate reached the Senate, Schumer broke with his fellow Democrats and sided with Wall Street — inspiring the hedge-fund industry to hail him as its "guardian."

"America's middle class have been forgotten," says Rep. Charles Rangel, who led the hedge-fund tax in the House. "It seems that those with the money have the power."