Schumer to vote against several top Trump nominees

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced on Monday that he will oppose five additional nominees for President Trump’s Cabinet, calling them “the worst” of his picks.

“Rep Mick Mulvaney for Budget Director, Rep Tom Price for Health and Human Services, Steve Mnuchin for Treasury, Scott Pruitt for EPA and Andy Puzder for Labor have repeatedly shown they will not put the American People or the Laws of our nation first, and I will vote against their confirmations,” Schumer said in a Facebook post on Monday.

He added that he will oppose nominees “who will be the very worst of this anti-immigrant, anti-middle-class, billionaires’ club cabinet.”

{mosads}The Senate’s top Democrat had already announced that he will oppose Rex Tillerson to be secretary of State, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to be attorney general and Betsy DeVos for Education secretary.

Schumer pledged on Monday that “nothing will change” on his opposition to those three, and he said he “will continue to demand that each nominee issue a public statement on his or her views of President Trump’s Muslim Ban.”

But Democrats face an uphill battle to block any of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, who need only a simple majority to be confirmed. Republicans hold 52 seats in the Senate.

The Senate will take a first procedural vote on Tillerson’s nomination on Monday. Schumer wants the former Exxon Mobil CEO to weigh in on Trump’s recent executive order, which temporarily bans immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, before the Senate takes up his nomination.

And Schumer is expected to ask for a vote on legislation that would nix the executive order, which also suspends the refugee program and indefinitely bars Syrian refugees, on Monday.

Schumer hasn’t voted against every Trump nominee. He supported James Mattis to lead the Pentagon, Rep. Mike Pompeo to be CIA Director, John Kelly to lead the Department of Homeland Security and Nikki Haley to be U.N. ambassador.

But the eight nominees Schumer has said he will oppose were each on a list of top targets that he and other Democrats outlined earlier this month.

Schumer added that the “country is at a cross roads” roughly one week into the Trump administration.

“In his first week in office the president has stomped over our proud American tradition of welcoming immigrants and refugees, trafficked in alternative facts, and is attempting to fill his cabinet with billionaires and bankers,” he said.

House and Senate Democrats are scheduled to hold a rally against Trump’s executive orders outside the Supreme Court on Monday evening.