NewYork- Republican President-elect Donald Trump is poised to build on his legacy of reshaping the federal judiciary with nominees who his allies and opponents predict could be even more conservative than the near-record 234 judges he put on the bench in his first stint in office. With Republicans set to take back control of the Senate, which must confirm judicial nominees, Trump should enjoy an easy path to filling possible vacancies on the US Supreme Court and the expected 100-plus seats that will likely open up on lower courts across the nation.”Trump remade the federal judiciary in his first term, and now he has the opportunity to cement that vision for an entire generation,” John Collins, a professor at George Washington University Law School, said in an email.
A new round of Trump-appointed, life-tenured judges would result in a more conservative federal judiciary that would be more likely to cast a skeptical eye on environmental, financial and other regulations and to uphold Trump’s agenda in the face of legal challenges.
Representatives for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
During his first four years in office, Trump’s 234 judicial appointments included three U.S. Supreme Court justices, giving the high court its 6-3 conservative majority, and 54 judges named to 13 intermediate appeals courts. It marked the second-most judicial appointments of any president in a single term.
Those appointments shifted the judiciary to the right, with Republican appointees today making up half of all active appellate judges and having majorities on six circuit courts. Many had connections to the influential conservative legal group the Federalist Society and remain active with the organization.
Those judges often embrace “originalism,” a legal philosophy that seeks to interpret the U.S. Constitution based on the text as understood at the time of its drafting in the 18th century.
That legal doctrine has formed the backbone of a series of rulings favoring conservative litigants in cases that have curtailed abortion access, expanded gun rights and limited government regulation.
While Trump in his first term from 2017 to 2020 turned to the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo as an adviser on judicial nominees, the Republican this time has surrounded himself with different conservative allies focused on judicial nominees.
Those include Mike Davis, a Trump ally and founder of the conservative judicial advocacy group Article III Project, who during Trump’s first term was chief counsel for nominations to the then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who is set to resume that role.
‘BOLD AND FEARLESS JUDGES’
“I think that Trump’s biggest and most consequential accomplishment of his first term was the transformation of the federal judiciary, and I hope he builds upon that in his second term with even more bold and fearless judges,” Davis told Reuters in the run-up to Tuesday’s election.
