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, 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.
Speaking to Politico, Schumer said the approach 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.
