Roughly a hundred left-wing activists gathered outside Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) Midtown Manhattan office Monday evening to urge him to convince his Senate Democrat colleagues to vote against President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.
Several New York City chapters of the left-wing advocacy group Indivisible Nation, a progressive grassroots organization with a goal of opposing the Trump administration’s agenda, organized the Monday evening protest to push Schumer to “whip the vote” and unite Democrats in blocking Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court.
“Everyone out here tonight is sending a huge message to our senator, that his action … or his inaction of late is totally unacceptable,” Ricky Silver, a member of the left-wing activist group Empire State Indivisible, shouted on his megaphone to the dozens of demonstrators outside Schumer’s Midtown Manhattan office.
“Will you whip the votes, Chuck Schumer? Will you hold the caucus together? Because the stakes are that high. Now is not the time to talk about tactics and potential issues with the Republican Party,” Silver added.
Many of the activists who showed up at the protest showed frustration with the New York Democrat for not showing up to a scheduled town hall last week to address their concerns.
One of the protesters held a cardboard cutout of Schumer to show how the senator “folds” on his promises and avoids speaking with his constituents.
Other demonstrators held signs with the words: “Chuck Get a Pair” and “Whip the Vote.”
A spokesperson for Schumer told the Hill that the senator was not in his New York City office at the time of the rally; he was in Washington, DC.
Shortly after Trump announced his decision to nominate federal appeals court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Schumer tweeted a statement vowing to “oppose” his nomination and urge the Senate to do so as well.
“I will oppose Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination with everything I have, and I hope a bipartisan majority will do the same. The stakes are simply too high for anything less,” Schumer said in a statement.