Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the United States is facing a “constitutional crisis” under the Trump administration.
Asked if he believes President Donald Trump’s calls to impeach a judge who ruled against his efforts to deport Venezuelan migrants amounted to a “constitutional crisis,” Schumer was unequivocal.
“Yes, I do, and democracy is at risk,” Schumer said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday. “Donald Trump is a lawless, angry man. He thinks he should be king. He thinks he should do whatever he wants regardless of the law. And he thinks judges should just listen to him.”
Trump’s call to impeach U.S. District Judge James Boasberg—who issued a temporary restraining order to halt the administration’s deportation of purported gang members under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—earned a rare and extraordinary rebuke from the chief justice of the Supreme Court earlier this week.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” said John Roberts, who has been the highest-ranking officer on the court since 2005, in a statement last week. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
Meanwhile, Schumer claimed Trump was “infuriated” by the success of some efforts to challenge his administration in court and offered his guarantee that Senate Democrats “will not impeach judges, full stop.”
The New York Democrat said he did not trust Trump to honor court orders and said his party will need to “watch him like a hawk.”
Boasberg has already sparred with the Trump administration about whether it defied an order he gave earlier this month.
After he told the administration to turn around planes that were being used to send alleged members of a Venezuelan criminal gang to El Salvador, where Trump ally President Nayib Bukele agreed to house them in maximum security prison, his instructions were ignored.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, said she was confident that Trump administration policies subject to legal challenges would ultimately win out in appeals.
“We are going to fight back,” she said in an interview with Sunday Morning Futures host Maria Bartiromo. “The Supreme Court will be ready to hear these cases ... And we are going to win.”
Schumer claimed during his Meet the Press appearance that, if the Trump administration were to ignore a Supreme Court ruling, “our entire democracy, this whole beautiful enterprise of democracy that we’ve had for over 240 years is at risk.”
He said, if that did happen, it would “trigger a mass movement from one end of the country to the other, something that we haven’t seen in a very long time.”
While Schumer offered those tough words, he remains under fire from Democrats for voting to advance a Republican stopgap funding bill, which earned him praise from Trump and scorn from his own colleagues in Congress. Some House Democrats have reportedly urged Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to mount a primary challenge against him.
Schumer defended his vote, claiming a government shutdown would have been “twenty times worse,” and insisted he won’t be stepping down anytime soon.
