Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) believes the federal judiciary offers the Democratic Party its strongest chance to defy President-elect Donald Trump.
President Joe Biden and a Democratic-controlled Senate spent the past four years lining the judiciary with Democrats in hopes they could defend their priorities.
Now they’ll be one of their only lines of defense against a GOP-controlled White House, Senate, and House of Representatives.
“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 this week.
Schumer said he decided to lead Democrats in prioritizing the judiciary after Republicans did so during the Bush administration. 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.’”
Trump and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) also prioritized appointing judges during Trump’s first term, with their focus leading to a 6-3 GOP majority on the Supreme Court. Schumer took note of their efforts, saying Democrats aimed to beat the Trump administration’s record.
“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 admitted that the approach of confirming so many judges was challenging, especially when Republicans levied 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.”
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Trump and Republicans have vowed to make cuts to several different areas of the government to reduce the massive government debt.
With the Senate slated to switch to Republican control in January, Schumer is set to become minority leader while Sen. John Thune (R-SD) will take his place as majority leader, replacing McConnell as the GOP’s chief in the upper chamber.
