Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Senate Continuing To Make Progress In Confirming President Biden’s Highly-Qualified And Diverse Judicial Nominees

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor on the Senate continued focus on confirming President Biden’s well-qualified judicial nominees. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Last night, the Senate stayed late to keep working on confirming more of the president’s judicial nominees.

We made excellent progress this week confirming judges, and I am pleased to say we’ve cleared the way to confirm many more judges when we return after Thanksgiving.

Today, we’ll pick up right where we left off last night.

Later this morning, we will hold two more cloture votes to advance two more District Court judges, Noel Wise to the Northern District of California and Gail Weilheimer to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

We’ll finish today with a confirmation vote on the nomination of Sharad Desai to be District Judge for the District of Arizona.

This would put our total for the week at six new judges confirmed to lifetime appointments to the federal bench – one Circuit Court judge and five District Court judges.

And, again, we’re in a strong position to confirm many more judges when we come back. We hope to make progress on as many as we can.

Now, I thank all my colleagues for their hard work last night and for being flexible amidst all the roll call votes. And I want to thank the floor staff, the cloakrooms, the pages, and all the staff in the Senate for staying late several nights this week so we could keep working on the floor. I understand if you all feel a little groggy this morning, that’s okay.

I’m proud that the judges we have confirmed under President Biden are exceptional, highly qualified, and have already begun to bring balance to our bench.

Our nominees are adding new perspectives and broad ranges of experience to their courts – we’ve confirmed individuals with strong experiences in consumer protection and voting rights and civil rights, Supreme Court advocacy, prosecution, and more.

In other words, the nominees we have considered represent a balanced and even-handed group of jurists.

And we will keep going when the Senate returns. Voting on the president’s nominees is a basic responsibility of the Senate. We will take that responsibility very seriously between now and the end of the year.

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