Trump can make his mark with judicial appointments
President has 21 nominees in pipeline for confirmation
Blogging under a pseudonym in 2008, Kentucky attorney John Bush opined that “it makes a difference who wins elections” because “it makes an awful lot of difference who appoints judges.”
To illustrate his point, Bush lamented that “activist judges” on the Supreme Court were responsible for “the two greatest tragedies in our country — slavery and abortion.”
Nine years later, the Senate Judiciary Committee is about to recommend Bush for a prestigious seat on a federal appeals court. Despite his controversial past as a social media blogger, the Senate likely will follow suit — all because President Trump won the election and, at least as far as judicial nominations go, is making a difference.
Twenty-one Trump nominees are in the pipeline for federal court vacancies held open near the end of the Obama administration, with more as soon as this month. Many are being blocked by Democrats and have aroused the wrath of interest groups.
Yet Republicans hold all the cards when it comes to making good on Trump’s vow to populate the federal judiciary with conservatives devoted to strict interpretations of the Constitution. They have 52 of 100 Senate seats and, if necessary, can limit the discretion customarily accorded homestate senators to block nominees.
As a result, the president and his legal advisers stand at the threshold of remaking the federal courts over the next few years by nominating and promoting mostly young, conservative thinkers whom they hope will be uncompromising in their approach to the law.
“The overall intellectual caliber of Trump’s nominees has been as high, if not higher, than any recent predecessor,” says Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
Liberal interest groups in a lather over Trump’s would-be judges don’t see it that way. They have condemned nominees such as Bush, 42, a Louisville lawyer, and Damien Schiff, 37, a senior attorney at the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation who once called Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy a “judicial prostitute” with a “chameleon mind.”
“These guys are real bomb throwers,” says Billy Corriher, deputy director of legal progress at the liberal Center for American Progress. If they and others are confirmed, he says, “we’re going to be living with Donald Trump’s legacy for a lot longer than Donald Trump is going to be in office.”
The same can’t be said for Trump’s predecessor. By the end of Barack Obama’s eight years, nine of 13 federal appeals courts had a majority of Democratic presidents’ nominees.
Trump has the chance to reverse that in just one term.
Trump’s first achievement may be his most important: Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to fill the seat of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Since April, Gorsuch, who turns 50 next month, has proven himself to be a defiant stickler for reading laws and constitutional clauses literally, regardless of outcome.
While the Supreme Court hears only about 75 cases each term, federal district and circuit courts hear some 30,000. So far, Trump has seated only one nominee — Kentucky’s Amul Thapar, confirmed without any Democratic support to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, based in Cincinnati. But 21 more are awaiting action; five, including Bush and Schiff, are scheduled for committee votes Thursday.
What’s more, the president is about to be handed his secondmost important vacancy: Janice Rogers Brown is retiring from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in August, giving Trump an opening on the court that has been a Supreme Court springboard in the past.
“We’re going to be living with Donald Trump’s legacy for a lot longer than Donald Trump is going to be in office.” Billy Corriher, Center for American Progress