There is one thing in common across the political spectrum in the United States: President Donald Trump has left a deep impression in the federal courts, so deep that it will last far longer than his only four-year term in the White House.
As a candidate, Trump used the promise of appointing conservative judges to win the support of skeptical Republicans.
Then, as president, Trump and his White House team relied on conservative legal organizations and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to ruthlessly, almost robotic, fill nearly every vacancy in the federal judiciary – plus 230 judges on the federal bank, including three new members of the Supreme Court – not deterred by Democrats.
It avoided criticism
In fact, despite Democratic criticism, the Senate still upheld judges more than a month after Trump lost his reelection to Joe Biden.
“In fact, since Jimmy Carter, Trump has done more than any other president in one term to make his mark on the judicial system,” said Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Congress created about 150 new magistrates during Carter’s presidency, he said.
The impact will be long-lasting. Among the judges appointed by Trump, who hold life positions, several are in their 30s. The three nominees to the Supreme Court could remain in the highest court for another 30 years in the mid-21st century.
Aside from the Supreme Court, 30% of the judges in the federal appeals courts, where nearly all cases are closed, were appointed by Trump.
The judges who owe Trump for their positions rejected the president’s efforts against his election defeat, but the true measure of what Trump has achieved will be revealed in the coming years in countless court rulings on issues such as abortion, weapons of fire. , religious rights and other issues of the strong divisions in the country.
When the Supreme Court prevented New York from enacting certain limits for church and synagogue attendance in areas badly affected by the coronavirus, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the most recent court member, was the deciding fifth vote. Previously, the court had allowed restrictions on religious services, with four judges in disagreement, including Trump’s other two nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Conservative
Five Trump nominees were in the majority of the 6-4 decision in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in September, making it harder for Florida convicts to regain the right to vote.
Last month, Justices Britt Grant and Barbara Lagoa, both appointed by Trump, formed the majority of a panel of three judges from the 11th Circuit Court ruling out the local ban on “therapy” to change the sexual orientation of LGBT minors. Other courts of appeal in the country have upheld the ban on these therapies.
In an early survey of Trump’s federal court nominees, political science professors Kenneth Manning, Robert Carp and Lisa Holmes compared his decisions to more than 117,000 opinions published since 1932.
The decisions of the Trump-nominated judges were “generally significantly more conservative” than those of former presidents, the academics concluded.
The constant over the past four years – through impeachment, the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s electoral defeat – has been his nomination of judges and confirmation by the Senate.
Trump used the issue of federal judges to gain the trust of voters who may have doubts about the conservative credentials of a millionaire with no political experience who once supported abortion rights.
Trump presented a list of potential nominees, prepared by the conservative Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, from which he would choose to fill any vacancies in the Supreme Court.
And there was a vacancy almost immediately after he took office, following the death of Judge Antonin Scalia in February 2016.
McConnell blocked President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland and even denied a hearing to the respected federal appeals judge that Republicans had previously identified as someone they could confirm.
And that vacancy wasn’t the only one waiting to be filled when Trump became president in January 2017. A total of 104 magistrates were open after Republicans used their majority in the Senate to almost completely delay the confirmation process in the last two. Obama’s Years in Office.
Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the Legal Committee and a strong critic of Trump, said the outgoing president’s judicial legacy is “far less than what he did than what he allowed others to do on his behalf.” .
Whitehouse said Trump essentially delegated court nominations to McConnell and the Federalist Society, specifically group leader Leonard Leo and former White House legal counsel Don McGahn.
At the same time, the Federalist Society and other conservative groups, such as the Judicial Crisis Network and Americans for Prosperity, have received millions of dollars in anonymous donations and launched public and behind-the-scenes campaigns by right-wing judges, Whitehouse said.
“That, I think, is new and clearly lends itself to corruption,” he said.
McConnell scoffed at the criticism. “The reason many of them are members of the Federalist Society is because of the central mission of the Federalist Society; give the courts back to what they are supposed to do and not legislate from within the magistracy.
In his campaign and at White House events, Trump continued to boast about his judicial appointments, omitting the essential reality that McConnell had blocked Obama’s nominees.
“When I arrived, we had over 100 federal judges who had not been appointed,” he said. Now I don’t know why Obama left it that way. It was like a wonderful gift to us, why the hell did he do it? Maybe he got complacent. ‘
Biden has vowed to undo many of Trump’s actions, but Americans “will live for decades with Donald Trump’s legal legacy as a result of his judicial appointments,” said Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, a center-left activism group. .
“I think it’s by far the most important thing he’s ever been involved in,” said McConnell, 78,. “And it is by far the longest-lived achievement of the current administration.”