Trump’s Real Personnel Victory: More Conservative Judges
While the public watches President Trump churn through White House staff members, his Administration is humming along nicely in filling federal judgeships, with the enthusiastic assistance of the Republican majority in the Senate, points out Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker.
Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court was Trump’s most important victory. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell kept that seat vacant for nearly the full final year of Barack Obama’s presidency.
“But McConnell didn’t just protect a Supreme Court seat for the next President; he basically shut down the entire confirmation process for all of Obama’s federal-judgeship nominees for more than a year,” Toobin writes. “It’s the vacancies that accumulated during this time—more than a hundred of them—that Trump’s team is now working efficiently to fill.”