Trump faces tight timeline to appoint judges as midterms loom
Trump moves to accelerate judicial confirmations as Senate control hangs in balance.
Highlights
- Six new nominees appear before Senate Judiciary Committee today (16 September)
- Trump has won confirmation of 54 judges since returning to office last year
- Trump appointed 234 in his first term
With Republican control of the US Senate in doubt, President Donald Trump's White House is pushing to confirm a raft of new federal judges before the year's end.
Trump announced he was nominating 13 new judges during a nine-day span in August while the Republican-led Senate was in recess. Six of those nominees will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee today (16 September), joining five others already pending before the full chamber, which confirms judges by majority vote.
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If Democrats during the 3 November midterm elections win control of the Senate from Republicans, who now hold a 53-47 majority, Trump's ability to confirm additional nominees could evaporate once new lawmakers take office next year.
"You always go into this with the fear of losing the Senate," said Robert Luther, a George Mason University law professor who worked on judicial nominations in the White House Counsel's Office during Trump's first term.
Regardless of whether Republicans keep control of the Senate, however, he and other experts say this round of judicial nominees may be one of Trump's last big chances to make his mark on the courts, since the pool of vacancies and judges likely to retire has been shrinking.
"Supreme Court vacancy notwithstanding, I expect this to be the slowest two years for judicial nominations under Trump," Luther said.
The scramble to confirm judges before a possible change in Senate control is not unique to Trump. Democratic President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats faced similar pressure ahead of the 2022 midterms.
Republicans failed to retake the Senate that year, allowing Biden to finish with 235 confirmed judges, one more than Trump was able to confirm in his first term.
Nominees Draw Praise From Conservative Activists
Trump's return to the White House last year has allowed the Republican president to continue reshaping the federal judiciary, winning confirmation of another 54 judges. His total appointments from both of his terms equate to nearly one-third of the federal bench.
Those judges helped to tilt the judiciary to the right, particularly Trump's three appointees on the US Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority. Since 2021, the court has curtailed abortion access and affirmative action, expanded gun rights and backed Republican-led congressional redistricting efforts.
Judges appointed by Trump have not always ruled in his favor, though, as evidenced on Tuesday when he criticized his appointees on the Supreme Court for ruling against a US Postal Service rule restricting mail-in ballots.
Among the nominees appearing before the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday is Zach West, who won praise from conservative legal activists for his work in the Oklahoma Attorney General's Office, where he defended abortion restrictions and argued that Oklahoma could not bar religious schools from participating in its charter school program.
Another nominee to be considered this month is Arkansas-based US District Judge Lee Rudofsky, whom the White House wants to elevate to the St. Louis-based 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals after he delivered a key ruling four years ago that weakened a landmark voting rights law.
