Gorsuch fight just the start of Trump judgeapalooza

WASHINGTON — The politically historic and costly confirmation battle over Neil Gorsuch being sworn in as a Supreme Court justice today has set the stage for President Trump to dramatically reshape the federal judiciary, with more than twice the vacancies former President Barack Obama had when he took office.

Conservative groups cheered Gorsuch’s installation as a win for constitutionalism, in the vein of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, whose vacancy Gorsuch fills.

“I am confident he will protect the Bill of Rights, especially our First Freedom of religious liberty,” Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said in a statement.

The GOP-controlled Senate’s elimination of Supreme Court filibusters, three years after Democrats did so for lower court appointments, puts Republicans in a position to quickly install a record number of federal judges.

But liberal groups have vowed a political fight that targets GOP midterm incumbents by reminding voters of the so-called “nuclear option” they launched to install Gorsuch.

And with roughly $5 million spent in ads for and against Gorsuch — an unusually high sum of political advertising in a non-election year — the battle over judgeships that ultimately end up deciding many hot-button issues from religious exemptions, free speech and even bathroom use to abortion will likely be played out over the airwaves.

“The many people who took part in the national debate around Gorsuch will not forget how this nomination was rammed through,” said Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron.

Trump has 125 vacancies among the nation’s 890 federal judgeships to fill. That includes openings on eight of the 11 federal appellate courts which dispense with most appeals before they get to the Supreme Court. In 2009, President Obama had only 57 federal court vacancies.

And because the average age of judges is higher than eight years ago, Trump is poised to make a bigger impact than his predecessor.

Obama installed 331 federal judges, including Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — totaling just over a third of the judiciary — during his eight years in office, including 30 percent of federal appellate judges.

But by actuarial estimates, Trump could be in the position to appoint as many as one-third to half the nation’s 179 appellate federal judges in his first term alone, assuming the GOP retains control of the Senate after the 2018 midterm elections. That could swing the ideological composition of appellate courts, now made by a majority of Democratic appointees.