Donald Trump’s sweeping electoral victory allowed him to consolidate power within his own party, but the Democratic resistance to the incoming president is starting to take shape and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) revealed a key strategy for how to handle the new administration.
With Trump’s inauguration just weeks away, Democratic leaders are turning to the judiciary as a defense against Republican Party policies, according to a new report in Politico.
“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 said in an interview with the outlet.
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Schumer pushed an ambitious plan after President Joe Biden took office in 2020 to take advantage of the party's Senate majority by seeing through as many judicial nominations as possible, the publication noted.
To that end, Senate Democrats have approved 235 of Biden’s judicial picks, exceeding the 234 judicial nominees Trump pushed through in his first term.
“When we started out, we knew it would be a very difficult job to do more than Trump had done,” Schumer told Politico. “But we did: We got 235 — more than a quarter of the federal judiciary was appointed by our Senate and by the president.”
But Democratic leaders still have a tall order to remain relevant in the new political landscape next month that will include a Republican trifecta of the federal government.