Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) elaborated on his party’s efforts to slow the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees, including Jeff Sessions, who was confirmed earlier in the day by the U.S. Senate.

Host Rachel Maddow told Schumer she had been told by former Obama White House officials their biggest concern about the upcoming Trump presidency was Sessions heading the Department of Justice. Schumer concurred by responding that Sessions was “anti-immigrant” and had a bad record on civil and voting rights.

“When Jeff Sessions was passed, it turned my stomach,” Schumer said. “I don’t have anything against him personally. It’s known we here in that gym together in the morning but to have a man like this with his record on immigration, he’s almost certainly the most anti-immigrant senator of the hundred, on civil rights and voting rights he’s probably one of the top three or four against these sacred rights, civil rights, and voting rights, he doesn’t belong there and I think a lot of Republicans know it.”

“What’s happened on the Republican side, even hope the many of them have doubts about these nominees, they’re afraid to break with Donald Trump,” he continued. “They’re marching in lockstep on these nominees and so many other things. Can you imagine if a Democrat had said the United States has moral equivalency to Russia and Putin? The Republicans would be howling at the moon. But here they just go along and say nothing. It’s a real display of lack of courage, of lack of strength, of lack of conviction for them to go along with these nominees and so do many things that I know in their hearts and minds is wrong.”

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