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.
