He will not do so on his own. Mr. Biden, who has decades of experience and relationships in the Senate, will play a critical role. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, has a narrow margin of control, but a wider one than Mr. Schumer’s, and House rules that give her considerably more leeway to push past Republican opposition.
But already this year, Mr. Schumer has shown that he is willing and able to move big legislation through the evenly divided chamber without any Republican support, as he did when he held Democrats together behind Mr. Biden’s nearly $1.9 trillion pandemic-era stimulus law.
For now, Mr. Schumer is putting the onus on others to show that they can produce a compromise. Republicans this week presented their own $568 billion infrastructure blueprint, which includes less than one-tenth the amount of new spending that Mr. Biden has proposed for public-works projects. The president welcomed that effort in his speech on Wednesday, saying he was open to hearing competing ideas, while cautioning that “the rest of the world is not waiting for us.”
But Republicans have dismissed the outreach as insincere, accusing Mr. Biden and Mr. Schumer of offering what Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, called a “multitrillion-dollar shopping list that was neither designed nor intended to earn bipartisan buy-in.”
“We heard about the so-called jobs plan, packed with punitive tax hikes at exactly the time our nation needs a recovery,” Mr. McConnell said on Thursday. “We heard about the so-called family plan, another gigantic tax-and-spend colossus.”
“Our Democratic friends,” he added, “have become addicted to divide-and-conquer.”
Mr. Schumer, in concert with Mr. Biden and Ms. Pelosi, has not been shy about reaching for what he calls “big and bold” achievements while he has the chance, with Democrats in control of Congress and the White House — a circumstance that might end in 2022, when Republicans could reclaim House and Senate majorities.