Democrats will rely on judges appointed by Joe Biden to protect his White House legacy from Donald Trump and blunt the most extreme elements of the president-elect’s agenda, the outgoing Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has said.
Schumer, a senator for New York and the highest-ranking elected Jewish official in US history, said the party would use the judiciary to spearhead a fightback following an election defeat that left a Republican “trifecta” in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress – the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Speaking to Politico, he said the approach had was based on the example set by the Republicans themselves, starting in the presidency of George W Bush, when the GOP began focusing on packing courts with conservative judges.
Trump appointed three rightwing justices to the US supreme court during his first administration, giving the court a 6-3 conservative majority that has resulted in – among other things – the overturning of the nationwide right to an abortion.
Learning from these experiences, Schumer said Biden had prepared the ground to enable Democrats to use the courts for political ends by appointing 235 judges during his single-term presidency – surpassing the 234 appointed by Trump in his first term.
“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.
“When we started out, we knew it would be a very difficult job to do more than Trump had done. But we did: we got 235 – more than a quarter of the federal judiciary was appointed by our Senate and by the president.”
Schumer said he and Biden had hatched a plan four years ago not only to prioritise legislation but to focus on appointing as many judges as possible.
“We knew that getting more judges on the bench would help protect our legislative record. The two did go hand in hand,” he said. “If you asked me which one was more important, I wouldn’t want to pick among my children.”
He said he had to work to persuade fellow senators of the merits of some appointees, while also arguing that confirming them was worthy of Senate floor time.
“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. 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.”
Confirming Biden-nominated judges acquired an added urgency after Trump’s win over Kamala Harris in last month’s presidential election, prompting the White House to urge senators to rush to confirm up to 30 nominees before the current legislative session ended, to prevent the vacancies being filled by Trump’s picks.
Trump demanded – without authority – that the Senate desist from confirming judges in the interregnum between the election and his inauguration on 20 January.
Schumer said it was important to appoint liberal judges to counterbalance appointees sympathetic to Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) agenda, whom the president-elect had put on the bench in his first presidency.
“We knew that Trump had loaded the bench up with a lot of Maga judges and achieving balance was important,” he said. “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 … is more important than it’s ever been.”
He predicted that Trump and his supporters would try to dismantle all areas of Biden’s legislative record.
“They’re going to come after everything. 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.”
