President Donald Trump and the Republicans’ effort to shift the courts to the right could be at an end, with the Democrats set to take control of the Senate next year.
During his first term, he put over 230 judges on the federal bench, including three on the Supreme Court. So far in his second term, the Senate has confirmed 57 of the president’s judicial appointments. In total, Trump nominees now make up about one-third of the active federal bench.
But the Democrats are now in a position to take at least 54 of the Senate seats and as many as 56, depending on the results in Mississippi and Alaska, so it’s very unlikely that Trump will be filling many more of the vacancies on the U.S. district and appeals courts.
“No one, or nearly no one, is going to get confirmed, so what he does in terms of nominating people, we’ll see,” Ed Whelan, a distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former law clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, told CBS News.
There are 28 vacancies on the federal courts and another 15 that will be opening up over the coming weeks and months. The president has formally sent 16 of his nominees to the Senate.
The GOP-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee is moving with alacrity to get those appointments before the chamber changes hands.
Republicans are violating “numerous longstanding standards in a desperate attempt to confirm more than 30 qualified loyalists to lifetime appointments before Democrats take the majority,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, on Tuesday.
But Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Judiciary Committee, was not impressed by Durbin’s assertion that he was departing from committee practice.
“Historically, this committee has shortened timelines when circumstances warrant it,” he said.
“The priority is going to be getting the judges across the finish line,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters on Monday.
But the federal bench seats that remain open at the end of the current Congress are likely to stay unfilled for at least the next two years.
“What we’ve seen is the federal courts being stacked with extremists and loyalists, and now Democrats have the power to stop the reshaping of our courts in a very dangerous direction,” said Rachel Rossi, president of the Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group.
Democrats’ complete trouncing of the Republicans in last week’s midterms also makes it highly unlikely that a Supreme Court justice appointed by a GOP president would be retiring in the final two years of Trump’s term, as a successor would almost certainly not be able to get through the Senate.
“Trump has managed to put in jeopardy his biggest achievement,” Whelan said.
