Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) thinks that the federal courts are the best place for the Democrats to stand up to President-elect Trump.
In order to protect their goals, President Joe Biden and a Senate controlled by Democrats have spent the last four years filling the courts with Democrats. Now that the GOP controls the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, they will be one of their only defenses.
“I don’t know exactly what [Trump will] do. But I can tell you this: The judiciary will be one of our strongest — if not our strongest — barrier against what he does,” Schumer told Politico.
Schumer said he chose to lead Democrats in putting the courts first because Republicans did the same thing under Bush.
Republicans “came up with a strategy in the George W. Bush [years]: ‘We’ve got to control the bench’ and they made every effort to do it,” Schumer said. “When I became majority leader, I said, ‘This is something we have to work on, we have to focus on.’”
During Trump’s first term, he and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) also put a lot of effort into picking judges. This helped the GOP gain a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. Schumer took note of their work and said that Democrats wanted to break the record set by the Trump government.
“When we started out, we knew it would be a very difficult job to do more than Trump had done,” the New York senator said. “But we did: We got 235 — more than a quarter of the federal judiciary was appointed by our Senate and by the president.”
He said it’s about protecting their “legislative record” against future administrations and other challenges.
Schumer said that the process of approving so many judges was hard, especially when Republicans brought charges against them.
“We would go to members and persuade them in two ways: Persuade some of them to vote for these judges because the Republicans threw all kinds of charges — mainly false — against them,” said Schumer. “And second, I had to persuade them that this was really important. And one of the most important things we could do with our floor time, particularly in ’23, ’24, when there was a Republican House.”
