Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Senate’s Continued Work To Confirm 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, including this morning’s vote to confirm Rebecca Pennell as District Judge for the Eastern District of Washington State. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:
Today, the Senate will keep working to confirm more of President Biden’s judicial nominees.
It’s already been a very productive week here in the Senate. We began on Monday by confirming Judge Kidd to serve as a Circuit Court judge to the Eleventh Circuit. He is the 45th Circuit Court judge confirmed under President Biden.
Yesterday, we kept going. We confirmed two more District Court judges to seats in Oregon and the District of Columbia, and invoked cloture on a third.
And we’ll continue today. This morning, we will vote on the confirmation of Rebecca Pennell to be District Judge for the Eastern District of Washington State.
We’ll then immediately turn to a cloture vote on the next judicial nominee, Amir Ali, to be District Judge for the District of Columbia.
We will continue working on judges throughout the day and into this evening. We have a lot of excellent nominees to work through, so I ask my colleagues to be flexible, to be ready to stay late, and to keep the votes moving quickly. We did that the other night and we got a lot of votes done relatively fast.
I’ve spoken at length about how proud I am of the nominees this Majority has confirmed to the bench. The over 200 judges we’ve confirmed have a sweeping range of experiences and areas of expertise.
One of our nominees today, for example, has argued and won three historic civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Another judge confirmed early in President Biden’s term built her career as an expert in worker protections and represented factory works and grocery store workers and taxi drivers and nurses. She is now a Circuit judge.
We’ve also had consumer protection lawyers elevated to the bench, including one nominee whose job was to go after health care fraud and deceptive marketing of pharmaceutical and medical devices.
And I’ve been proud to support nominees to the Second Circuit who have been leading voting rights attorneys.
And the experiences go on: our nominees have represented children who’ve faced abuse, individuals wrongly convicted, and more.
At the end of the day, of course, what matters most in a nominee is whether or not they can render impartial judgment based on precedent and the rule of law. But it’s also important that judges come from different walks of life.
Judges should not operate like cold unthinking machines, nor is the work of justice a mere theoretical exercise. Judges are better off when they can interpret the law while putting themselves in the shoes of those over whom they preside, from the privileged to the impoverished. Judges are more likely to reach an equitable and prudent ruling if they can appreciate how their decisions will play out in society.
And that is more likely to happen if our bench is comprised of jurists with many different experiences from many different walks of life.
So, I thank my colleagues for their good work this week, and we will keep working today.
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