Chuck

Chuck Schumer urges FCC to reject petition allowing AI robocalls ahead of key November midterm elections.

United States Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York has urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) not to approve a petition by the conservative group Club for Growth to allow AI-generated robocalls ahead of the November midterm elections.

“Under this change, campaigns could use their opponents’ voice to send out a message that is, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, a blatant lie,” Schumer said on Monday.

The petition was originally filed on August 31, and the public comment period began on September 4 and expires on Monday.

Earlier this month, Anna Gomez, the Democratic member of the FCC, urged her colleagues not to allow consideration of the petition brought by the national conservative fiscal policy organisation.

Her concerns echoed Schumer’s. “[If] the FCC allows a dark money group to flood Americans’ phones with AI-generated robocalls they never agreed to receive, it would bring chaos so close to Election Day,” commissioner Gomez told the Reuters news agency at the time.

There is precedent for the concerns being raised. In the 2024 presidential election, ahead of the New Hampshire primary, voters received an AI-generated version in the voice of President Joe Biden, the then Democratic incumbent, telling them not to vote. The FCC said that a political consultant working with longshot primary challenger Dean Phillips was responsible.

At the state level, Louisiana, Tennessee and Vermont passed laws this year requiring disclosures for AI-generated campaign phone calls. While robocalls have been used in political campaigns for years, FCC rules prohibit such calls to cellphones without prior consent, but the restrictions do not apply to landlines.

Club for Growth’s president, David McIntosh, in a statement earlier this month, said that the group is asking for “the FCC to treat First Amendment-protected political speech the same way it already treats wireless calls about package deliveries, bank accounts, and doctor’s appointments”.

“There is no one at the FCC that has expressed any interest in moving to an order on this or any of the petitions, and there are zero plans to do so. The FCC seeks comment on petitions that come in as a matter of normal procedure,” a spokesperson for the FCC told Al Jazeera.

Actor Tom Arnold unleashed on Chuck Lorre on X in response to the former “Roseanne” writer-producer’s claims in his new memoir, “Sitcom.”

“He thinks he’s brilliant & beloved like Norman Lear but Chuck ‘Chuckles’ Lorre’s a terrible human, an angry dry drunk who lies every time he opens his mouth,” Arnold wrote Tuesday.

Arnold and the ’90s sitcom’s co-creator and titular star, Roseanne Barr, were married Jan. 20, 1990, four months after he first appeared on the show as a poker pal of Barr’s TV husband and four days after Barr’s real-life divorce from her husband of 14 years, William Pentland, was finalized.

Barr and Arnold were hostile to their writing and producing colleagues on the show and the network, Lorre told the Los Angeles Times’ culture critic Mary McNamara in an interview published Tuesday, the day of the book’s release.

“We were punished, the writers,” Lorre told The Times. “The word ‘cruelty’ comes to mind. And I still don’t know why, why so much cruelty. It wasn’t like we didn’t want to make a great show. We were proud to be on that show.”

Hired in 1990 after Barr fired all of the show’s writers, Lorre recalls in the book that he had a rude awakening when he took the job.

“I was now the co–executive producer on the number one show on television. I swaggered into the office assigned to me and met Danny Jacobson (a world-class comedy writer who would go on to cocreate ‘Mad About You’ with, sorry, Paul — ‘My Two Dads’ — Reiser),” Lorre writes in “Sitcom.”

Chuck Lorre, pictured in 2024, related several anecdotes in his book “Sitcom” that didn’t sit well with Tom Arnold.

(Willy Sanjuan / Invision / Associated Press)

“Danny, having been fired by Roseanne for being talented, was packing up his stuff when I walked in. He showed me a sloppy, hand-scribbled couple of pages and explained this was a ‘script’ by the show’s new executive producer, Tom Arnold. It had been part of Danny’s job to write real scripts and put Tom’s name on the front page — as if Tom had written them,” Lorre continues. “Bob, myself, and several other staff writers would be ordered to do this on many occasions…. Was it a portent of bad things to come? You tell me.”

For her part, Barr admitted after the 1990 firings, “Yeah, I probably was difficult to work with, now looking back.”

“I don’t think I was as especially clear as I could have been,” Barr told former Times television writer Rick Du Brow in a November 1990 article. “It’s like being a woman and an administrator — I never had any background like that. I didn’t know how, like I do now, to go in and say, ‘This is what I want you to do.’ I think that’s common with women in business. I would go in there and try to get them to agree with me rather than tell them what I want to do.”

Arnold’s social media screed doesn’t directly address any of Lorre’s claims in the book but resorts to name-calling and his own claims against the producer, who went on to create or co-create sitcom hits including “Cybill,” “Dharma & Greg,” the Charlie Sheen-starring “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory” and its offshoots.

“He trashes Trump but he is Trump & he’s a bitter hack who actually believes his lame vanity cards at the end of his lame shows are Paddy Chayefsky worthy,” Arnold wrote, invoking the three-time Oscar-winning writer of “Network.” “Chuckle’s made $800,000,000 off the backs of very talented women & a naive cracked up Charlie Sheen (clean & sober since he’s not under Lorre’s strange, abusive tutelage) then trashes them all to make him feel cool but don’t worry, Chuck hates himself more than we ever could.”

Lorre’s accounts of Arnold in “Sitcom” included several other anecdotes, including one seemingly questioning the “True Lies” and “The Stupids” star’s trustworthiness.

“Executive Producer Tom was angrily explaining to Bob [Myer] and me that some bastard had stolen Roseanne’s love letters to him and sold them to the National Enquirer. His plan was to hire a private detective and get to the bottom of this treachery. And he did. It took one day. The detective found a cashed check for twenty-five grand from the National Enquirer made out to Tom Arnold. Mystery solved.”

Lorre was famously fired after two years on the show, which Arnold recalled in concluding his X post: “I wish everyone could’ve seen his arrogant, sad clown face the day Roseanne made me fire him.”

Barr later fired Arnold from “Roseanne” in 1994 amid their divorce. In 2018, after posting a racist tweet, Barr was fired from the “Roseanne” reboot, which was resurrected as spinoff “The Conners.”

WASHINGTON — Chuck Schumer has won and lost Senate majorities since becoming Democratic leader a decade ago. But this year’s midterm elections could be his most important yet, with some in the party having said he needs to step down and make way for a new generation.

Schumer, who has directly or indirectly overseen his party’s Senate campaign arm in almost every election cycle over the last 20 years, has regained trust within his caucus, for now, as Democrats are hopeful of making gains in the midterm elections despite a difficult map that favors Republicans.

Allies of the New York Democrat say it’s a significant turnaround from last year, when the party was still reeling from major election losses. A low point came in the spring of 2025, when the party’s base erupted at Schumer for voting to keep President Trump’s government open.

Interviews with more than a dozen Democratic senators in recent weeks indicate that Schumer has recovered his political standing with many in his caucus. If Democrats gain seats in the election, colleagues expect him to easily win enough support in the closed-door leadership election, likely the week after Election Day.

Should they win a majority, a feat once seen as improbable, another term as leader would be nearly assured, many said. Both parties pick their Senate leaders by secret ballot, so no senator has to reveal their vote.

Still, nothing is guaranteed. While no Democrat has stepped up to challenge Schumer, that could quickly change if his party suffers an unexpected level of losses. And several Democratic candidates around the country have said publicly that they won’t vote for Schumer or have remained noncommittal.

Interviewed by The Associated Press earlier this month, Schumer stated unequivocally that he’s running for another term as leader. He said he believes Democrats have won more favor with voters over the last year and have a shot at winning the majority after fighting Trump’s tariffs, forcing more than a dozen votes to end the war in Iran and focusing on affordability, corruption and healthcare.

“I think our caucus is strong, it’s united,” Schumer said. “A year ago, everyone said it was out of reach. Today, we have a broader map, strong candidates, a clear contrast.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said that “Senate seats in some ruby red states seem to be in play” because of candidates Schumer recruited.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat who has served with Schumer for almost 30 years, said that “if you had told us in 2025 that we’d be in the home stretch with a really good shot of taking the majority, it would have been like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ You can’t argue with results.”

And if Democrats don’t win additional seats? “I’m not thinking about that,” Wyden said.

Some senators won’t commit to supporting Schumer

While Schumer appears to be in a good position at the moment, many Democratic senators won’t say publicly whether they will support him — particularly those in the most progressive wing of the party.

“It’s a little bit too early to speculate on that right now,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she is focused on November’s elections. “We’ll know a lot more after the midterms,” she said.

Freshman Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan has called for a “new generation” of leaders across the party.

“It’s not a secret that Democrats still haven’t totally found their footing after Trump,” Slotkin said in a recent interview, adding that “we have to see what the results of the election are.”

It’s unclear if anyone else wants the job

Even if there are losses in Senate races, it’s unclear if any other Democrat wants the burden of being leader. Many are instead eyeing runs for the White House in 2028.

Speculation about a challenge to Schumer has centered on Sens. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who has already said he’s running for the No. 2 leadership spot to replace retiring Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin.

Asked about Schumer, Van Hollen said he doesn’t want to discuss it yet.

“Look, I think everybody wants to get through this election, and then we’ll go from there,” Van Hollen said in an interview before the Senate left Washington to campaign.

Several Senate candidates around the country have either said they won’t vote for Schumer if they are elected or remained noncommittal, including Troy Jackson in Maine, Adam Hamilton in Kansas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

At the same time, the Senate Majority PAC, which is closely aligned with Schumer, has put millions of dollars into those campaigns and others. Schumer backed El-Sayed’s primary opponent, but the two met in Washington last month.

El-Sayed said after the meeting that the party is united and “we’re having really productive conversations about what it takes to win.”

Schumer has kept his caucus close

Several of the Democratic senators who insisted on anonymity to share their views agreed that Schumer is likely to win another term as leader. There have been very few discussions about a change, said one, partially because Schumer has stayed close to almost everyone in his caucus, keeping them on speed dial in his famous flip phone. Another senator said that they aren’t aware of Schumer asking for any commitments just yet.

At the same time, some said they would like to see Schumer, who is up for reelection in 2028, announce that this is his last term as leader and commit to helping transition to a successor. A commitment like that could end the conversation, one senator said.

Another senator said that a commitment from Schumer about the future isn’t as important — what will matter is if they win in November.

All of the senators agreed that there are no obvious contenders right now to challenge him, but that could change quickly if Democrats lose Senate seats in November.

Schumer has turned the tables since 2025

Attitudes within the Democratic caucus have improved since last year, when the base revolted against Schumer for the March vote to keep the Republican president’s government open. Progressive groups like MoveOn called for him to step down, arguing that Democrats needed to fight harder against Trump and Republicans.

Schumer regained some favor with Democrats inside and outside the Capitol during a prolonged government shutdown a year ago and as he has repeatedly blocked Trump’s nominees and Republican legislation.

But while the calls to resign or step aside have waned, many are still agitating for change.

“Our priority right now is organizing and making sure we elect a new generation laser-focused on affordability and fighting corruption,” said Joel Payne, a national spokesman for MoveOn.

Referring to the 2025 calls for Schumer to step aside, Payne said the group’s members have “already rendered a judgment on Schumer’s tenure and made clear they’re eager for new leadership that energizes the party base.”

It’s unclear, though, whether calls from the progressive wing of the party will influence the secret ballot vote, in which Schumer needs only a majority to win.

Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., dismissed the talk about Schumer’s future.

“It’s hard to lose if no one else is challenging you,” he said.

Jalonick writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Steven Sloan, Seung Min Kim and Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.