Toward a less dangerous judicial branch
With SCOTUS, the courts of appeals and the federal district courts being filled with constitutionalists, we are seeing a less dangerous judicial branch. These judges will not legislate from the bench and will respect the Constitution.
Read the rest of the article at the link.According to the consortium conducting exit polls in the 2016 presidential election, 21 percent of voters viewed Supreme Court appointments as the “most important” factor in making their choice. These voters supported Donald Trump by a 15-point margin—more than enough to secure his victory, given the tightness of the race.
Among Trump’s first moves in office was the nomination of Neil Gorsuch, confirmed by the Senate on April 7, 2017, to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of conservative stalwart Antonin Scalia in February 2016. Anthony Kennedy’s retirement in June 2018 opened a second Court vacancy. President Trump’s nominee to fill that seat, Brett Kavanaugh, seemed well on his way to certain confirmation when it was leaked that Christine Blasey Ford had accused him of assaulting her while in high school. Ultimately, now-Justice Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed by a near-party-line vote. Trump has thus filled two of the nine seats on the nation’s high court in his first two years in office.
It’s too soon to know exactly what kind of justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will be, but both are legal superstars with clear conservative judicial records. Trump has delivered for voters who prioritized the Supreme Court as an issue.
Moreover, the Trump administration, to date, has significantly outpaced its recent predecessors in winning Senate confirmations to the U.S. Courts of Appeal. Federal appellate courts are the courts of last resort in far more cases than will ever find their way onto the Supreme Court docket. (The Supreme Court has typically issued 70 to 80 merits opinions per term in recent years; federal appellate courts receive tens of thousands of filings every year.) Through November, Trump had appointed 29 of the 166 authorized active judgeships in the 12 regional Courts of Appeals—compared with 11 by the same time in Barack Obama’s presidency, 12 for George W. Bush, and 19 for Bill Clinton. And several more circuit court nominees await their confirmations.
Trump’s nominees to federal district courts have been confirmed relatively less quickly. Through November 2018, the Senate had approved 53 of his nominees for district courts, compared with 30 for Obama, 83 for Bush, and 107 for Clinton at the same point in their presidencies. But Trump has more than 50 district-court nominees pending, and many are likely to be confirmed—if not during the lame-duck period after the election, then by the new Senate, with a slightly larger Republican majority.
The president’s success in winning confirmation for his judicial nominees is a testament to the acumen and vetting process of the now-former White House counsel, Don McGahn, and the political skills of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The Democrats’ ability to obstruct confirmations has also been hampered by the 2013 decision of former Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid to jettison the Senate filibuster rule for judicial nominations. Reid’s decision secured confirmations for three Obama administration nominations to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that Republicans had held up but left the Democrats with limited options for slowing or blocking nominations when in the minority, as they have been during Trump’s presidency so far.