Trump’s court appointments have run smoothly — he’s had some help

WASHINGTON» President Donald Trump failed repeatedly to get Congress to pass a new health care law. He came up empty on immigration and gun bills after giving lawmakers conflicting messages. His budgets were ignored on Capitol Hill. And after 17 months in office, he has yet to even write his long-promised measure to repair the nation’s infrastructure.

Yet when it comes to stocking the nation’s federal courts, Trump has performed with remarkable efficiency and success. He got the Senate to confirm conservative Judge Neil M. Gorsuch for the Supreme Court soon after taking office and since has been remaking the lower courts far more quickly than his predecessors.

Unlike in other areas in which Trump insists on calling the shots — going with his gut, impulsively tweeting and dispensing with the sort of deliberate and disciplined strategy essential to working with Congress — the president has deferred to a trio of more experienced hands when it comes to the judicial nominations so important to his conservative base.

“This is a zone where Trump is willing to say, ‘I got a guy here who knows what he’s doing,’” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and informal Trump adviser.

Gingrich was talking about Donald McGahn, the White House counsel who

has held a tight grip on the interview process. Yet Gingrich and others give singular credit to Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, a national network of conservative lawyers; Leo, starting at Trump’s request during the 2016 campaign, worked along with the Heritage Foundation to create the unprecedented list of Supreme Court candidates that Trump has used to select Gorsuch and his soon-to-be-announced pick.

The third player is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a master tactician who for nearly a year blocked President Barack Obama’s final Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland, leaving the vacancy for Trump to fill, with Gorsuch. Since then McConnell has engineered smooth confirma- tions in the narrowly Republican-controlled Senate for Gorsuch and dozens of lower-court nominees, almost all of whom have been vetted by Leo. McConnell calls his role in the judiciary’s makeover his proudest legacy.

Known less than the other two men, Leo has spent decades working toward a judiciary that shares his anti-abortion rights views and conservative positions on interpreting the Constitution narrowly. As he did during the Gorsuch confirmation process, Leo has taken a leave from the Federalist Society to advise Trump. This week he created a war room to spearhead the selection and confirmation process.

Having culled the list of potential nominees, Leo is now focusing on rallying conservatives and libertarians around the eventual pick. Aware of Trump’s need for credit and praise, he has been careful to minimize his influence in public comments.

“At the end of the day, presidents are Type A personalities,” Leo said in an interview. “They drive things that they want, and anybody who suggests otherwise is just not aware of what’s going on.”

Leo said Trump is looking for three qualities: a candidate with “a good resume and a good pedigree,” who interprets the Constitution as the framers intended and is not weak, the last a quality Trump emphasizes in all of his personnel decisions.

“You have to be someone who is courageous and is not going to bend to pressure,” Leo said. “When someone comes to Washington, there’s a lot of cultural and social pressure.”

The list Leo began preparing during the campaign now includes 25 people, all but one of them judges with long records on the issues conservatives most care about.

Trump has said that on Monday he will name a replacement for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.