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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, today, the Senate moves forward on confirming more of President Biden's judicial nominees.

Yesterday, the Senate confirmed Judge Embry Kidd to serve a lifetime appointment as a circuit judge to the Eleventh Circuit. Judge Kidd will be an excellent addition to the bench. He is exceptionally qualified. He has extensive experience as a judge, a prosecutor, and an attorney in private practice.

I thank my colleagues for supporting his nomination and for moving him through the Chamber.

Last night, I also filed cloture on another nine nominees to serve as district judges across the country, including Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia. If you include these nominations with those I filed last week, I will now have filed cloture on a total of 12 district court judges since the end of last week.

We will keep working to confirm these nominations as quickly as we can, starting this morning with the cloture vote on the nomination of Mustafa Kasubhai to be a district judge for the District of Oregon.

For the information of Senators, we expect to vote on as many as three judges today. Members should be prepared for another late night on Wednesday to vote on the nominations I filed last night.

Voting on the President's judicial nominees is a core function of the Senate. It is one of our basic responsibilities, and we are going to carry out that responsibility as long as this majority continues.

I am very proud of the judges we have confirmed over the past 4 years under this administration. They have all been highly qualified individuals, and together they represent a wide range of experiences and areas of expertise.

For a long time, this Chamber primarily focused on confirming nominees with backgrounds as prosecutors or from big law firms. Of course, many of these individuals have gone on to serve as excellent judges, but this majority and this administration have cast a wider net. For 4 years, we have expanded the sort of backgrounds and resumes that make for a qualified nominee to the Federal bench. We have more judges from backgrounds in consumer protection and civil rights and voting rights. We have confirmed more women and people of color too. All of these individuals are highly qualified by their own merits, but their broad range of backgrounds and experiences is an additional asset to the bench.

But we are not done. There are more judges to consider and confirm. We are going to spend the rest of the week and the rest of this year focused on confirming them, and I thank all of my colleagues for their continued good work. Let us continue.

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