Trump faces tight timeline to appoint judges as midterms loom
Sept 16 (Reuters) – With Republican control of the U.S. 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 on Wednesday, joining five others already pending before the full chamber, which confirms judges by majority vote.
If Democrats during the November 3 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky, whom the White House wants to elevate to the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after he delivered a key ruling four years ago that weakened a landmark voting rights law.
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His confirmation would give Trump appointees a majority on the court, making it the first of the nation’s 13 federal appeals courts to be dominated by his chosen judges.
Rudofsky, West and other nominees did not respond to requests for comment.
TRUMP’S MARK ON THE COURTS
Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump and his allies have frequently criticized judges who blocked administration policies amid hundreds of lawsuits challenging his actions.
At the same time, the White House has resumed a central first-term goal: placing conservative lawyers and Trump allies on federal trial and appellate courts nationwide. Many of his appointees are in their late 30s or early 40s, and could remain on the bench for decades, influencing legal disputes long after his presidency ends.
Judges appointed by Trump during his first term, particularly in Texas and North Dakota, repeatedly blocked Biden’s efforts to reshape immigration policy, forgive student debt and expand LGBTQ+ rights protections.
Senate Democrats have said his second-term nominees have reflected an emphasis on loyalty. They point to nominees’ answers at Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in which they uniformly avoided stating directly that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, typically responding instead that Biden was “certified” the victor.
The White House said its nominees were selected based on their qualifications.
“President Trump selects highly qualified and credentialed judicial nominees who have passed the White House’s rigorous vetting process,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in a statement. “Wherever there are judicial vacancies, President Trump will select highly qualified nominees with great respect for our Constitution and rule of law to be confirmed expeditiously.”
Three of Trump’s 13 previous appellate nominees this term had served as his personal attorneys, including Emil Bove, now a judge on the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The other two have likewise been confirmed.
Still, many of the president’s second-term picks have backgrounds similar to the judges he appointed during his first administration.
Several are members of the conservative Federalist Society, including West and another nominee appearing Wednesday, Courtney Coker, a prosecutor nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, a venue frequently sought by conservative litigants challenging Democratic policies.
