Trump May Not Be Able To Tilt The Courts As Much As He Wants
HuffingtonPost: For all the lifetime circuit judges he’s confirming ― and it’s a lot ― he isn’t replacing that many Democratic appointees.
After two years of confirming President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees at warp speed, Republicans just hit a new milestone: They flipped the balance of a U.S. circuit court from a Democratic-appointed majority to a GOP-appointed majority.
But where is all this headed? How different will the judiciary look by the end of Trump’s first term? A closer look at the circuit court seats that the president has filled or could fill suggests that he won’t get to replace as many Democratic-chosen judges with his conservative picks as he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) might have hoped.
Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, crunched the numbers on this in December and found that 19 of Trump’s 29 circuit judges were replacing judges selected by other Republican presidents. HuffPost updated his numbers: 24 of the 36 circuit judges Trump has confirmed so far have replaced Republican picks.
In other words, despite Trump’s filling circuit court vacancies like there’s no tomorrow, he’s mostly replacing older Republican-appointed judges with younger ones. And there’s no reason to believe that Democratic-appointed judges will voluntarily create a wave of vacancies over the next year and a half for Trump to fill. That means the current balance of GOP-vs.-Democratic-appointed judges on these courts isn’t likely to look much different by the end of Trump’s term.
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-circuit-courts-judicial-nominations_n_5c929174e4b0d952b222bbbc
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