Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On Senate Confirmation Votes Today On Rohit Chopra To Be CFPB Director, Tracy Stone-Manning To Be Director Of The Bureau Of Land Management, And Voting Rights Expert Dale Ho To Be A Federal District Court Judge For The Southern District Of New York

Washington, D.C. –  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor regarding the vote to confirm Rohit Chopra to serve as the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Tracy Stone-Manning to be the Director of the Bureau of Land Management, and voting rights expert Dale Ho to be a District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York, and the importance of confirming more of President Biden’s qualified nominees. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Despite a week marked by Republican obstruction, the Senate is making great progress on our responsibility to confirm President Biden’s nominees to his Administration.

Last week, a handful of members made a scene here on the Senate floor in a doomed effort to stymie a number of nominees critical to our national defense. I am glad to say that over the course of the week we have successfully confirmed these individuals despite these theatrics from that handful of Republican Senators. This chamber will not allow anyone to hijack the confirmation process to score political points, to prevent these nominations from being approved. It will not happen, we will move forward. It will take a little more time, but we will get it done.

Today, the Senate will keep going: after passing the CR we will turn to the nomination of Rohit Chopra to serve as the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Mr. Chopra is the right man to lead this agency tasked with protecting Americans from predatory financial institutions. He is a veteran of the CFPB from the Obama years, where he specialized in protecting students from unscrupulous practices of student loan providers.

Under President Trump—who didn’t give a hoot about the average person—the CFPB spent more time protecting the likes of payday lenders and for-profit colleges than American consumers. With Mr. Chopra’s confirmation, the CFPB will return to fighting on the side of the American workers instead of big financial institutions. I look forward to his confirmation today.

After that, we will turn to the nomination of Tracy Stone-Manning to lead the Bureau of Land Management. Few agencies are as important for protecting and promoting America’s public lands, and in the years to come the BLM will play an even greater strategic role in our government’s efforts to fight climate change.

Ms. Stone-Manning is a familiar face here in the Senate: she served as a staffer for Senator Tester before moving to Montana to work for then-governor Bullock. As head of Montana’s environmental agency, she earned a reputation not only as a skilled policy maker but also an honest broker, one who commanded the respect of conservationists and ranchers alike.

Of course, you’d never guess that by listening to some of the histrionics coming from the other side. Unable to disqualify Ms. Stone-Manning on the merits—which are so obvious to just about anyone who studies them—some of our Republican colleagues have used her nomination to launch cheap, out-of-context attacks.

Thankfully no one is taking these attacks seriously. Because of her exceptional qualifications, Tracy Stone-Manning has broad support of the Democratic caucus to lead the BLM and I expect her nomination to be approved later today.

Finally, I am also pleased that today President Biden is announcing the nomination of another outstanding judge from my home state: Dale Ho to serve as a district judge for the Southern District of New York.

Like so many of President Biden’s judicial nominees, Mr. Ho is a prominent civil rights lawyer and voting rights expert. A graduate of Yale and Princeton – and veteran of the NAACP and the ACLU – Mr. Ho would bring an impressive resume to the judiciary. And I am thrilled President Biden has taken my advice to nominate Mr. Ho and I look forward to working on his confirmation.

And a more general note on this issue: I am proud that the Senate is not only increasing the demographic diversity on the bench—more women, more people of color, and more individuals from immigrant families— but also its occupational diversity as well: voting rights experts, civil rights lawyers, public defenders and more. This is how we work to strengthen not only the diversity in our judiciary, but the trust that it represents to all Americans.

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