Soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is already planning how to thwart Persident-elect Donald Trump and the majority of Americans who voted for him. Schumer said this week that he views the federal judiciary as the Democratic Party’s strongest tool to push back against President-elect Donald Trump. Over the past four years, President Joe Biden and the Democratic-controlled Senate strategically filled the judiciary with Democratic appointees, aiming to safeguard their priorities.
With Republicans set to control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, the judiciary will now serve as one of the Democrats’ few remaining lines of defense. “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.’”
During Trump’s first term, he and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made judicial appointments a top priority, successfully establishing a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer acknowledged their efforts and stated that Democrats aimed to surpass the record set by the Trump administration.
“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.” Schumer emphasized that the effort is focused on safeguarding their “legislative record” from future administrations and potential legal challenges. He acknowledged that the aggressive strategy of confirming a high number of judges was not without difficulties, particularly as Republicans frequently criticized their nominees.
“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.”
Trump and Republicans have pledged to implement cuts across various sectors of the government in an effort to address the growing national debt. No doubt the federal judges that Schumer helped to appoint will likely hear many cases related to those efforts. But with Republicans set to take control of the Senate in January, Schumer will transition to minority leader, while Sen. John Thune (R-SD) is poised to assume the role of majority leader, succeeding Mitch McConnell as the GOP’s leader in the upper chamber. And Republicans will have at least two years to appoint more constitutionalist judges like they did during Trump’s first term.