You have to give this much to outgoing U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. He does not seek to hide his plans to try to derail the will of the American electorate that will put Donald J. Trump back in the White House on January 20.
According to reports in Politico, Schumer is planning a multi-front political ambush of the Trump agenda.
This starts with trying to derail Trump's emergency response to Biden's wave of illegal immigrants (some of whom are creating crime waves in places such as New York, Colorado and Utah). The "dreaded Venezuelan crime gang," Tren de Aragua, for instance, designated by the US Department of Homeland Security as a Transnational Criminal Organization (TCO), and called by Interpol "a significant security threat to the United States," is now "unleashing terror across 19 states" and has set up shop in remote North Dakota and "every major city of Tennessee."
Schumer is also reportedly trying to ambush efforts to cut a bloated over-regulated federal government, and has made it plain that Democrats will seek to obstruct, delay, block and prevent the very initiatives that gave Trump a win on election night.
He recently met with a coalition whose stated goal is to prevent the deportation of illegal immigrants – to be clear – these are the people who ignored the laws followed by immigrants in virtually every immigration wave that has made this country great. Crashing across the border and mocking our sovereignty, illegal immigration has rocked our nation. Schumer seems intent on allowing the assault to continue if, for no other reason, than to find methods that will allow him to oppose Trump, even at the expense of our nation.
The senior senator from New York appears brazen in his strategy. In his interview with Politico, he stated, "I don't know exactly what [Trump] will do. But I can tell you this: The judiciary will be one of our strongest — if not our strongest — barrier against what he does."
There is no small irony that this is coming from a public official who complained about Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' "partisan decisions."
Somewhere, Schumer seems to have forgotten that the judiciary is a separate and equal branch of the federal government, and that their decisions are deliberately isolated from the ebbs and flows of American politics. Like all umpires, the public can criticize balls and strikes but, at the end of the day, notwithstanding Schumer's less-than-democratic efforts to disrupt the results of an election, our judges need to call them as they seem them.
When Trump takes the oath on January 20, he will immediately be faced with a broad range of issues -- from inflation to the Russian warlord Vladimir Putin -- from energy independence to cutting federal fat. The overriding challenge, however, will be recapturing authority over our borders: without that ability, the domestic tranquility our Constitution seeks to guarantee is put at grave risk. Schumer's role as an obstructionist is beyond politics as usual. It is dangerously un-American and should be called out for what it is.
Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.
