President Trump has been more focused and more successful than any modern president in appointing excellent judges to the federal courts. With the help of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Trump has produced impressive raw numbers in terms of judicial influence.
Still, McConnell is not the Senate majority leader Trump should be thanking. That honor goes to McConnell's predecessor, former Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada.
Despite unprecedented, massively obstructive tactics by Senate Democrats, Trump, in fewer than three years, has secured the confirmation of two Supreme Court justices and 50 appeals court judges. In contrast, Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, in eight years each, secured just two appointees to the Supreme Court and, respectively, only 62, 61, and 49 appellate judges. At the highest levels of the federal courts, then, Trump is securing appointments at about twice the rate of his three predecessors. At the district court level, Trump has successfully appointed 132 of the 677 judges authorized by law and has an additional 42 nominees pending. In this respect, he is moving at about the same pace as recent presidents.
In total, at all court levels together, Trump’s average number of confirmations per year exceeds every president in history except (barely) for Democrat Jimmy Carter, who enjoyed a large Senate majority and no concerted obstructive efforts by Senate Republicans.
Again, Trump and McConnell have achieved this despite the dilatory tactics of the Democrats, who have forced procedural “cloture” votes an astonishing 131 times on Trump’s judicial nominees, compared to only seven cloture votes in the first three years of all of the previous five presidencies combined.
How did Trump and McConnell manage this feat? It all goes back to Reid's greedy effort to stack the courts. In 2013, with Obama in the White House and Democrats controlling the Senate, Reid made the fateful decision to limit Senate debate on judges — something he had strongly opposed when Republicans had considered doing it during the Bush administration.
Unlike those earlier Republicans, Reid got Democrats to stick together on the so-called nuclear option, using a bare majority of the Senate to make a major rule change that the wiser voices in his party warned against. Thanks to Reid, it would no longer take 60 votes to confirm a judge.
It was a very short-sighted decision because Obama would only enjoy the advantage for a single year. After Republicans seized the Senate in the 2014 election, they hit the brakes on judicial appointments. McConnell made sure that Obama would end his presidency with only about the same number of judges confirmed (329) as Bush had before him (327).
As a result, Trump would take office not only with the opportunity to fill judicial vacancies with a simple majority, but also with the opportunity to replace dozens and dozens of Democratic appointees who chose to retire in 2013, 2014, or 2015 in the belief that Obama would replace them. This has given Trump a unique opportunity to influence the judiciary that even future presidents will not enjoy.
It is also good for the nation because the quality of Trump’s nominees has been superb. Even Ian Millhiser, the left-wing writer for Vox who greatly laments Trump’s successes on this front, acknowledged that “based solely on objective legal credentials, the average Trump appointee has a far more impressive resume than any past president’s nominees.” The result, he writes, is that Trump has “filled the bench with some of the smartest, and some of the most ideologically reliable, men and women to be found in the conservative movement.”
This is good news for the Constitution and everyone who believes that the Constitution’s governing framework is a blessing to humanity. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 62, “a government with unpredictable and arbitrary laws poisons the blessings of liberty itself.” Instead of unpredictability and arbitrariness, Trump’s judges are likely to deliver interpretive clarity and consistency.
In practice, his appointments guarantee that First and Second Amendment rights of free speech, free exercise of religion, and gun ownership will remain fully protected. Meanwhile, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment protections in criminal-justice matters will be on firm foundations with reliable, not capricious, application from case to case. America will survive at least as long as judges like these refuse to bow to postmodern, politically correct ideas about meting out justice differently depending on who the parties are at law.
During his run for the presidency, Trump regularly and energetically promised to make a priority of putting well-credentialed conservatives of excellent character and scholarship on the federal bench. It is a promise he has kept, much to his credit and for the country’s greater good.
"Great" - Google News
December 26, 2019 at 12:00PM
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Trump's judges are great. He has Harry Reid to thank - Washington Examiner
"Great" - Google News
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