Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) claimed Wednesday that Michael Cohen’s plea deal with federal prosecutors means the Senate must stop considering President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.

“In my view, the Senate should immediately pause the consideration of the Kavanaugh nomination,” Schumer (pictured above) said during a speech on the Senate floor. “At this moment in our nation’s history, the Senate should not confirm a man to the bench who believes that presidents are virtually beyond accountability, even in criminal cases — a man who believes that presidents are virtually above the law and only Congress can check a president’s power.”

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When a reporter asked White House press secretary Sarah Sanders during Wednesday’s daily briefing about Schumer’s latest attempt to delay the Kavanaugh nomination till after the November midterm elections, she did not mince words.

“This is a desperate and pathetic attempt by Democrats to obstruct a very highly qualified nominee,” Sanders replied. “The hearing date has been set for September 4, and Judge Kavanaugh will be there.”

Similarly, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement that he “strongly” opposes “any postponement of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Kavanaugh.  Senator Schumer may believe that the Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort cases invalidate the election — I do not.”

Cohen was Trump’s personal lawyer during the 2016 presidential campaign and once insisted in a Vanity Fair interview that he “would take a bullet for the president.” Cohen reached a plea deal with prosecutors Tuesday on eight felony counts — two of which concerned campaign finance law violations.

He pleaded guilty to facilitating payments to two women claiming to have engaged in affairs with Trump: Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. It is far from clear if any current campaign finance law or regulation would apply to the Daniels or McDougal situations.

The president’s former lawyer now claims that he paid the two women with the “coordination and the direction of a candidate for federal office.” The unnamed “candidate” presumably is Trump.

Schumer argued that Senate Committee on the Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is holding the hearing “too soon” following Cohen’s plea deal.

“It’s a game-changer. It should be,” Schumer argued. “A president identified as an unindicted co-conspirator of a federal crime, an accusation made not by a political enemy, but by the closest of his own confidants, is on the verge of making a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, a court that may someday soon determine the extent of the president’s legal jeopardy.”

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Grassley said through a spokesman that the September 4 hearing will go on as scheduled and noted that “Justice [Stephen] Breyer’s confirmation occurred when President Clinton’s records had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury. Obviously, we are nowhere near close to that situation today.”

Grassley added that Schumer’s call for a delay is “just the latest tactic from opponents who decided to vote ‘no’ weeks ago, frantically looking for anything that sticks.”

Even so, Schumer insisted that it is “unseemly” for the president of the United States to fulfill his constitutional duty to nominate a Supreme Court justice “who could soon be effectively a juror in a case involving the president himself.”

“In light of these facts, I believe Chairman Grassley has scheduled a hearing for Judge Kavanaugh too soon, and I am calling on him to delay the hearing,” Schumer reiterated. “The doubts about Judge Kavanaugh’s fitness for the bench were just magnified by Mr. Cohen’s plea agreement.”

Schumer was not alone in his call for delaying the hearing as other senators piled on, claiming that Trump should not be allowed to fulfill his constitutional duty in nominating Supreme Court justices to fill vacancies.

“I will also be canceling my meeting with Judge Kavanaugh. This President, who is an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal matter, does not deserve the courtesy of a meeting with his nominee — purposely selected to protect, as we say in Hawaii, his own okole,” Sen. Mazi Hirono (D-Hawaii) said in a statement Wednesday.

Related: Trump Mocks Cohen but Feels ‘Such Respect for’ Manafort

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted, “I will not take a meeting with Brett Kavanaugh. He has been nominated by someone implicated, and all but named as a co-conspirator, in federal crimes. His nomination is tainted and should be considered illegitimate.”

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) tweeted, “Americans don’t want a president who is an unindicted co-conspirator in a crime to have the power to appoint someone to the Supreme Court. We should not proceed with Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings.”

But Democratic senators have been scrambling for months to gather arguments for why the Senate should delay Kavanaugh’s hearings. Prior to Cohen’s plea deal, Democrats’ most common excuse was that the Senate should wait until after the midterm elections in November, thus giving Democrats a chance to retake the majority and block Kavanaugh’s confirmation altogether.

In a related development Wednesday, Democratic senators are also seeking to delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation process by demanding copies of an estimated 1 million documents from Kavanaugh’s time as former President George W. Bush’s staff secretary. Kavanaugh also worked as an attorney for Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater-Lewinsky investigation of former President Bill Clinton.

“Judge Kavanaugh worked in the Bush WH for 5 years, 35 months as Staff Secretary. He called that time ‘formative’ for his career as a judge. The Judiciary Committee has ZERO documents from his 35 months as Staff Secretary. It’s a black hole in his record. #WhatAreTheyHiding,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) tweeted Wednesday.

“In 2010, the public was able to see 99% of Justice Kagan’s record from her time in the Clinton White House. Fast forward to 2018, and the public has seen only 2% of Judge Kavanaugh’s record from his time in the Bush White House. #WhatAreTheyHiding,” Durbin added.

But Taylor Foy, Grassley’s communications director for the Senate Judiciary Committee, told LifeZette that “just as the committee agreed on a bipartisan basis not to seek Justice [Elena] Kagan’s solicitor general records because releasing such sensitive material could jeopardize the candor of internal administrative deliberations, the committee is not seeking Judge Kavanaugh’s staff secretary records.”

“The committee, however, has sought records relating to his time as a government lawyer, which would provide far more insight into his legal thinking,” Foy added. “Thus far, the committee has received more than 430,000 pages of these records – more than twice the historic high water mark from previous Supreme Court nominees.”