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.
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