'Foot Soldiers In Black Robes': Chuck Schumer Torches Trump's 'Radical' Judicial Nominees

During remarks on the Senate floor Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spoke about President Trump's judicial nominees.

Transcript

00:00On judges. Today Republicans will spend the day ramming through more of Donald

00:06Trump's extreme judicial nominees. When choosing his judges, only one thing

00:11matters to Donald Trump, unquestioned fealty to him. Brazen, unquestioned fealty.

00:17Doesn't matter what the law is, doesn't matter about judicial independence or

00:22precedent, or even the Constitution. The only thing that Trump cares about in a

00:29judge, we've seen this, we know it. Our Republican colleagues who just march in

00:33lockstep to vote for these awful judges know it. The only thing Trump cares about

00:39is unyielding fealty to him, and he says it, brazenly. We have never seen such a

00:45disturbing litmus test for judges in America. The judges before the Senate

00:50today are no different than the previous ones. Radical, inexperienced, and chosen

00:56not for their fairness, but for their ideological fealty to Donald Trump and the

01:00hard right. The first nominee, Joshua Devine of Missouri, is a political

01:05operative, a political operative, with no judicial experience, who made a career

01:11attacking everything from voting rights, to common-sense gun safety, to defending

01:15government overreach, and to people's private lives. It's said that Donald Trump

01:19wants to make sure that no one has ever, no one in this, who gets nominated, has ever

01:26shown any, any independence. He looks through their campaign finance, he looks

01:34through who they've worked for, no independence. Mr. Devine hasn't even been

01:39out of law school ten years, and spent less than half that time practicing as an

01:44attorney. The next nominee, Christian Stevens, is also of Missouri, similarly made a

01:50name for himself by undermining racial justice efforts in our judicial system,

01:54and siding almost relentlessly with corporations in cases of worker

02:00discrimination. That's who Donald Trump puts in. If the average American has the

02:06ability to go to court and fight their boss or anything else, Donald Trump wants

02:12nominees who will always side with the big shots, with the well-connected.

02:17Nominees like Devine and Stevens should frighten anyone who cares about a strong

02:21independent judiciary. They have failed to show the American people that they

02:27won't just be Donald Trump's foot soldiers in black robes. The Senate should

02:32reject their nominees, their nominations, yield the floor.