Inside Chuck Schumer’s stealth operation to block Trump’s MAGA revolution

Chuck Schumer has revealed how he has been working in the shadows to fill the US courts with liberal judges in an attempt to block Donald Trump’s policies.

Democrats will be largely kept out of power for the next two years, with special elections to replace Trump’s Cabinet nominees their only chance to win back the Senate, House of Representatives and the White House.

Schumer, who will remain the Senate minority leader, offered reason for optimism: the 235 federal judges Biden has appointed during his term, one more than Trump.

‘I don’t know exactly what he’s going to do. But I can tell you this: the judiciary will be one of our strongest — if not our strongest — barriers to what he does,” Schumer told Politico last night.

The New York Democrat says he and Biden devised a plan early in his term to put confirmation judges at the top of their agenda, sometimes even before they had adopted policy goals.

“When we started, we knew it would be a very difficult job to do more than Trump had done, but we did it,” Schumer said.

While Biden will ultimately only send Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Schumer says this president’s nominees now make up 25% of the federal judiciary.

It appears that will remain the case after the president angered Republicans earlier this week by vetoing bipartisan legislation that would have created 66 new federal judges.

Conservative legal analyst Jonathan Turley called Biden a “cowardly partisan” for ignoring the law at the drop of a hat Fox News op-ed.

“By vetoing the bill, Biden is once again destroying any claim that he is a president who can put the public interest above narrow political interests. It ends his presidency on a cynical, obstructionist note,” Turley wrote.

The White House said in a statement that “hasty action” by the House left important questions unanswered about the lifetime positions.

“The efficient and effective administration of justice requires that these questions of necessity and allocation be further studied and answered before we create permanent judges for life-term judges,” Biden said.

He said the bill would also have created new judges in states where senators have not filled existing judicial vacancies, and that these efforts “suggest that concerns about judicial economics and business flow are not the true motivating force behind the passage of this bill.”

As for Schumer, adding liberal justices will be a firewall against Trump retracting their policy achievements.

“We knew that getting more judges on the bench would help protect our legislative record,” Schumer said Politics.

‘The two went hand in hand. If you asked me which one is more important, I wouldn’t want to choose between my children.’

The senator says he is only following the strategy put forward by George W. Bush’s White House.

“When I became majority leader, I said, ‘This is something we need to work on, we need to focus on.’

He said he had to “convince” skeptical Senate colleagues that it was worth doing, but declined to identify what problems existed.

Schumer claims Trump and the Republican Party will try to get rid of Biden’s record on “everything.”

“They have so many different parts of MAGA: the people who are against women’s rights; the people who are against the environment; the people who are anti-working people and anti-union rights; the people who are against the consumer. They are going to use the judiciary in every possible way,” he said.

The count also marks the largest number of confirmations in a single term since the Jimmy Carter administration.

Next year, Republicans will seek to increase Trump’s already significant influence over the composition of the federal judiciary during his second term.

Biden and Senate Democrats placed particular emphasis on adding women, minorities and public defenders to the judicial ranks.

About two-thirds of Biden’s appointees are women, and a large majority of appointees are people of color.

“When I ran for president, I promised to build a bank that looks like America and reflects the promise of our nation. And I am proud to have kept my promise to strengthen confidence in judicial decision-making and outcomes,” Biden said in a statement.

Biden also emphasized hiring more civil rights attorneys, public defenders and labor rights attorneys to expand the professional backgrounds of the federal judiciary.

More than 45 appointees are public defenders and more than 20 were civil rights attorneys.

Although Biden confirmed more district judges than Trump, he had fewer senior appointments than Trump: 45 compared to 54 for Trump.

And he received one appointment to the Supreme Court, compared to three for Trump.

Republicans, much to the frustration of Democrats, filled Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the court the week before the 2020 presidential election. Ginsburg had died in September.

Democrats also faced the challenge of confirming nominees during two years of a 50-50 Senate.

Rarely has a week gone by in the current Congress when Schumer failed to win votes on judicial confirmations, while liberal groups urged Democrats to show the same urgency to judges that Republicans showed under Trump .

Chuck Grassley, a Republican and the next chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Democrats showed renewed resolve on judicial confirmations.

“They learned a lesson from the first Trump administration,” Grassley said. “It’s worth paying attention to the number of judges you get and the type of judges you put on the job.”

Trump will inherit nearly three dozen vacancies in the judiciary, but that number is expected to rise because of Republican-appointed judges who postponed their retirements in the hope that a Republican would return to office and choose their replacements.

There are also liberal justices who could face potential legal action after withdrawing from their retirement plans after Trump won in November.

The Article III Project, a group led by Trump ally Mike Davis, announced in mid-December that it had filed judicial misconduct complaints against the two court judges who also rescinded pension plans after the election.

These judges are U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn in North Carolina and U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley in Ohio.

U.S. Circuit Judge James Wynn, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama on the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, announced his decision in a letter to Democratic President Joe Biden that same day.

It was the first time since Trump won the Nov. 5 election that a Democratic-appointed appellate judge had withdrawn plans to take senior status, a form of semi-retirement for judges that creates vacancies that presidents can to fulfill.

Grassley vowed no matter what, he will work to improve Biden’s numbers.

“I can assure you that by January 20, 2029, Trump will be bragging about getting 240 judges,” Grassley said.