Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has revealed the Democratic Party’s secret weapon in fighting a rearguard action against Donald Trump’s MAGA offensive.
The Democrats are holding onto one last hope after a disastrous election in which they lost control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.
For the past four years, President Joe Biden, Schumer, and his colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee have been quietly stacking the federal judiciary with liberal-minded judges knowing they could one day provide a crucial bulwark against a resurgent Trump.
Just before Christmas, they achieved their goal of pushing through a record 235 judicial nominations, more confirmations in a single administration than any since the Jimmy Carter White House. That total includes 150 women judges, the most under any president.
With less than a month to go before Trump can begin putting his MAGA policies into action, Biden and Schumer see the batch of new judges as their best, and perhaps their only chance of preserving any kind of legacy from the last four years.
“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 Playbook in an exclusive interview.
“They’re going to come after everything,” he said of the Trump administration. “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.”
The Democrats didn’t go the traditional route of picking prosecutors and lawyers from “fancy” firms but chose people from all walks of life – civil rights lawyers, voting rights experts, teachers, mentors, union reps, scholars – to “resemble America,” Schumer boasted.
Schumer said they tried to 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.”
He told Politico: “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.”
Schumer saw the writing on the wall in the last couple of years and he said: “We also saw that the hard right was gearing up to use the bench in case after case to achieve their goals.”
It will be a struggle to control a rampant Republican Congress, fueled by a White House intent on recrimination. But Schumer is hoping his army of judges can hold the fort until (he hopes) the cavalry arrives in the mid-terms two years away.
The use of the Senate’s power to shape the judiciary was aggressively practiced by Schumer’s Republican opposite number Mitch McConnell, who had set a record for confirmations under Trump’s first term. McConnell also created a conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court with a series of power moves. First he blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland, then a federal appeals court judge, by then-President Barack Obama to replace the conservative justice Antonin Scalia who died in March 2016, then when presented with an almost identical vacancy by the death of the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, rushed the conservative Amy Coney Barrett on to the bench.
