Q&A – President Trump’s Judicial Appointments

Democrats are likely to find sympathetic judges even without shopping for a particular judge or court.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
You have questions, Brian has answers. It's time for today's
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Yeah, President Trump's judicial appointments. This is brought to you
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And you'll also see a little microphone button. You see it,
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this one at Brian mud Radio. The judicial overreach is
bs A is potus making any progress and appointing new judges. Okay,
so about this. A couple different things pertaining to one

(01:08):
of the latest decisions that the administration believes his judicial overreach.
Los Angeles judge on immigration raids Fox's Channelly Painter with the.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
Latest that judge ordering the Trump administration to cease immigration
stops and arrest in seven California counties, including Los Angeles,
after immigration advocacy groups filed a lawsuit saying President Trump's
administration systematically targeted quote brown skinned people. The judges order
temporarily blocks arrest without quote reasonable suspicion that the person

(01:42):
is in the country illegally.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
As for US Department of Handland Security Secretary Christy Nome,
she has this to say in response.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
This judge made a decision that we will appeal and
we will win because he's wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
We've never targeted individuals based on those qualifications that he
laid out. So last Monday, my top takeaway was that
President Trump was the second most effective president in American
history in carrying out his agenda by that date. Specifically,
I said this the BBB was delivered to President Trump,
allowing him to effectively accomplish his second term agenda and
fewer than six months on the job. Trump has been

(02:18):
president for one hundred and sixty seven days. During that time,
he signed one hundred and sixty six executive orders, forty
four presidential MEMORANDUS seventy one proclamations in five laws. And
while President Trump has worked with historic speed in accomplishing
the needs to complete his domestic agenda today, the one
area he has not worked in at a historic pace

(02:40):
been the federal judiciary. One reason that you've not heard
any progress in the appointment of new federal judges is
because that, as of today, there haven't been any new
federal judges in Trump's second term. And there are two
reasons for that. They both point back to the same dynamic,

(03:03):
the political makeup of the Senate preceding President Trump's first
term and the political makeup preceding this second term Republicans.
If you go back to Trump's first term, Republicans controlled
the Senate during the final Congress preceding Trump's presidency. This
allowed the GOP to slow walk President Obama's judicial appointments,

(03:27):
most notably for the Supreme Court, creating many vacancies that
naturally come about due to retirements, attrition, what have you.
And by the time President Trump was worn into office,
the result was that President Trump was able to place
the highest number of federal judges in the first term

(03:48):
of a presidency in modern American history. Now, entering Trump's
second term, the dynamic was different. Democrats controlled the Senate
and they were able to use the lame duck period
of Biden's presidency preceding the change and control of the
Senate in January to confirm as many federal judges as possible.
In the end, this led to Biden having the second

(04:10):
highest number of federal judicial confirmations in a first term
in modern American history. Biden, by the end, ended up
with only four fewer federal judges than Trump did. So
what happened was when Trump came into a second term,
just not many vacancies. There are only forty federal court vacancies,

(04:31):
and as of today, President Trump has nominated just fourteen
individuals for federal judge ships during his second term, you know,
not even one for every one of those forty vacancies.
Yet none of those nominees has been confirmed by the Senate,
largely due to the Senate's focus to date on passing
the president's legislative agenda. Those five laws, of course, the

(04:54):
biggest being the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was
recently finished, so confirming these judges that will likely be
a focus going forward for the Senate. But again, you're
just not talking about many. When you look through a
historical ends here to give you an idea, and I
covered this, I had a A, Q and A related
to this coming into Trump's second administration, and the numbers

(05:18):
even over you know where they were six months ago,
have changed. These are how many active judges are serving
by presidential appointment. As of today, there are ten federal
judges left that were appointed by President Reagan. There are
ten remaining that were appointed by George W. Bush. You
have thirty judges that are still on the bench appointed

(05:39):
by Bill Clinton. You have one hundred and eleven that
were appointed by George W. Bush, two hundred and forty
by President Obama, two hundred and twenty nine by President
Trump during his first term, and two hundred and thirty
six from President Biden. So you take a look at that,

(06:00):
overwhelmingly Obama and Biden, you know they have they're the
two highest number of judges that are still serving. And
with this breakout, what we see is that the federal judiciary,
just in sheer numbers, does lean left heavily. We're talking
about fifty eight percent of all federal judges that have
been appointed by Democrats, and so therefore all other factors

(06:23):
being equal, I mean, we talk about judge shopping. Democrats
don't even have to try that hard to find sympathetic
judges because basically six out of ten are at least
by way of appointment to the left. And this topic
is one of the most important dynamics in American politics
that has often overlooked. Now President Trump managed to meaningfully
overhaul the Supreme Court during his first term, it's absolutely

(06:45):
important that he works towards reshaping the federal judiciary to
the extent that he can and his second administration. But again,
a lot of this will come down to whether you
have retirements and just you know, attrition at higher levels
and also at a time in which Republicans have controlled
the Senate. That's another important factor here, obviously,