Chuck Schumer Has A Long Game For Judges, Too

For years, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been crafting his legacy as the Senate leader who played the long game to stack the nation’s federal courts with conservatives.

But with two years under his belt as Senate majority leader and a strengthened majority heading into the next two years, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is showing that he’s playing the long game for confirming Democratic-appointed judges, too.

Schumer has been helping President Joe Biden outpace past presidents with his judicial confirmations. The Senate has confirmed 96 of Biden’s lifetime federal judges as of Tuesday. That’s more than Donald Trump (85) and Barack Obama (62) had confirmed by this point in their presidencies. If the Senate tops 100 confirmations by the end of the year, which is Schumer’s goal, Biden will surpass former President George W. Bush, too.

Perhaps more remarkable is the diversity Biden’s already put onto the courts. Of his 96 judges, 75% are women, 68% are people of color, 48% are women of color and 24 are Black women. That’s a huge departure from the nation’s breathtakingly white, male federal judiciary. His court picks are professionally diverse, too: some are public defenders, voting rights lawyers, and union organizers, in addition to historic firsts with Native Americans, Black women, LGBTQ picks and Muslim Americans.

These judges will forever be categorized as Biden appointees. But Schumer has been instrumental in ushering them all through. He already considers his record of confirming Biden’s judges one of his greatest accomplishments as Senate majority leader.

“It’s way up there,” the New York Democrat said in a recent interview with HuffPost in his Senate office. “It’s No. 2 or 3, if not No. 1.”

Schumer has pushed through all of these judges despite significant challenges in the Senate. The chamber has been split 50-50, along party lines, for the entire time he’s been in charge. That has meant he hasn’t been able to lose a single Democrat when holding confirmation votes. COVID has made it harder to schedule votes. He’s had to take extra procedural steps to force some of Biden’s court picks out of the Judiciary Committee, where they were stuck after the panel tied along party lines. In one case, Schumer had to summon Vice President Kamala Harris to the chamber to break a tie to confirm Jennifer Sung, now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

“Many, many, many days” were lost because of GOP delays…