Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On Continuing To Confirm President Biden’s Well-Qualified Nominees To The Federal Bench

Washington, D.C. –  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor regarding the upcoming votes to confirm President Biden’s nominees Samantha Elliott as District Judge for the District of New Hampshire and Jennifer Sung to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

In addition to our legislative agenda, the Senate will also work today—and the rest of this week—on confirming more of President Biden’s nominees to serve on the federal bench.

First, we will hold a vote this morning to proceed on the nomination of Samantha Elliott to serve as a District Judge for the District of New Hampshire.

And as soon as today, we also hope to vote on the confirmation of Jennifer Sung of Oregon, nominated to sit on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 

The Senate invoked cloture on Ms. Sung at the end of last week, and I want to say a few words in support of this remarkable nominee.

Throughout her career, Ms. Sung has proven herself to be an exceptional and impartial adjudicator, a valiant advocate for working Americans—and I am confident she will be an excellent judge who adds to the personal and professional diversity of the Ninth Circuit.

A graduate of Oberlin and Yale Law School, Ms. Sung’s first experience with the Ninth Circuit came while she served as a clerk for Judge Betty Fletcher, before embarking on a career in private practice focused on employment and on labor law.

For over a decade, she regularly represented low income workers, minority workers, underserved communities in disputes against their employers.

As a member of the Oregon Employment Relations Board, she struck a difficult balance between protecting the rights of working Americans while applying the law without prejudice: the key ingredients for any successful federal judge.

If confirmed, Ms. Sung would be one of the very few Asian-Americans to sit on the federal judiciary. Along with Ms. Elliot, she would be the thirty-first judge that the Senate Democratic Majority has confirmed this year, the most under any President’s first year in decades. And we are doing it with outstanding, impartial, and diverse nominees.

And we are going to keep working in the months ahead: today Article III judges are still overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly from big law firms or prosecutorial backgrounds.

Many of these individuals have served admirably on the bench, but we hope the trailblazers of today can be closer to the norm of tomorrow: we want our courts to include more women, more diverse candidates (both demographically and professionally), and more judges who come from unique walks of life.

That is how we can strengthen Americans’ trust in an independent and impartial judiciary, so important to the vitality of our democracy.

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