New York Democrat Senator Charles Schumer, the leader of his Party in the Senate, has hatched a plan to thwart the plans of President-elect Donald Trump.
His party will have less power after January 20, 2025, as it will not have control of either House of Congress or the White House, but the plan is to use the judiciary that he and President Joe Biden stacked to take on the new administration.
“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,” he said in an exclusive interview with Politico’s Playbook.
“When we started out, we knew it would be a very difficult job to do more than Trump had done,” he said. “But we did: We got 235 — more than a quarter of the federal judiciary was appointed by our Senate and by the president.”
“We knew that getting more judges on the bench would help protect our legislative record,” the Senate Majority Leader said. “The two did go hand in hand. If you asked me which one was more important, I wouldn’t want to pick among my children.”
And he said they got the idea from the Republicans, who did the same.
The Republican Party “came up with a strategy in the (former President) George W. Bush [years]: ‘We’ve got to control the bench’ and they made every effort to do it,” he said. “When I became majority leader, I said, ‘This is something we have to work on, we have to focus on.’”
“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,” the senator said.
“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,” he said.
The interview went on to cover a variety of other subjects that the senator gave his opinions on.
He was asked about what “accomplishments” of President Biden he believed that the Republicans, along with the president-elect, would go after first.
“They’re going to come after everything. They have so many different parts of MAGA: the people who are anti-women’s rights; the people who are anti-environment; the people who are anti-working people rights and union rights; the people who are anti-the consumer. They’re going to use the judiciary in every way they can,” he said, using several keywords that his Party leans on.
The Senate Majority Leader, until January 20, also spoke about balancing his priorities.
“When I set out, I wanted to do both: Have a major legislative record, but at the same time, get as many judges confirmed as possible because we knew that Trump had loaded the bench up with a lot of MAGA judges and achieving balance was important. And the more the better. … In a time when there’s more legislative gridlock and there’s an attempt to use the judiciary to actually legislate, having judges that are not MAGA judges, that are not extreme judges, is more important than it’s ever been,” he said.
He said that he knew they would have to work on securing the judiciary as they knew that they were being stymied with legislation and was frightened that Republicans would use the judiciary to stop Democrats.
“In ’23, ’24, it became much more important, because we saw that we would not be able to accomplish more legislatively. And we also saw that the hard right was gearing up to use the bench in case after case to achieve their goals,” he said.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
