President Donald Trump will end 2025 behind on judicial confirmations compared to the pace of predecessor Joe Biden, but ahead of the rate Trump set during the first calendar year of his previous term in the White House.
With 53 seats, majority Republican senators had wide latitude to confirm the administration’s picks for the federal bench, filling district court seats in red states and filling key spots on influential appellate courts.
The Trump administration is set to end the 2025 calendar year with 26 lifetime judicial confirmations — six confirmations to the nation’s circuit courts and 20 to district courts, according to tallies from groups that track judicial nominations.
The Biden administration in 2021, during his first calendar year in office, secured 40 such confirmations, with 11 circuit confirmations and 29 district court nominations, according to the Alliance for Justice and the American Constitution Society.
The conveyor belt of Trump judicial nominees often did not dominate the news cycle on Capitol Hill. Instead, it largely operated in the background as attention turned to larger fights over the government shutdown, the confirmation of Trump Cabinet nominees and the GOP’s reconciliation bill.
The judicial nominations also came as Trump distanced himself from The Federalist Society, a prominent conservative group that guided his nominations during his first term.
In May, Trump erupted at The Federalist Society, a signal he could be looking to fill the federal bench with a different type of conservative judge in his second term.
“I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!” Trump wrote in a post on social media. “With all of that being said, I am very proud of many of our picks, but very disappointed in others.”
Trump also called Leonard Leo, the organization’s co-chairman and a fixture in the nation’s conservative legal movement, “a bad person” and someone who “obviously has his own separate ambitions.”
Regardless, the administration found strong allies among Senate Republicans, who showed a strong deference to backing the president’s nominees.
Senate Republicans pushed past Democrat outrage in confirming Emil Bove, the president’s former defense attorney, to a lifetime spot on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.
Bove, while serving as acting deputy attorney general in the early days of Trump’s second term, established himself as a key player in the administration’s push to overhaul the Justice Department, and garnered a reputation as an enforcer.
Bove, during his confirmation hearing, faced questions about a whistleblower allegation that he told DOJ lawyers to consider defying court orders that would stop planned deportations.
Christine Chen Zinner, the federal research and advocacy director at the progressive Alliance for Justice, said one reason Trump’s second-term pace is currently slower than his Biden’s might be because there has to be “additional vetting to see how loyal someone might be.”
“A lot of the nominees we’re seeing now seem to almost have an unfettered loyalty to Trump, and vetting out who might fit this mold could possibly be taking more time,” she said.
Also at play was a Democratic floor strategy deployed for months that forced the GOP majority to use valuable floor time on procedural votes on a variety of nominees.
“The Senate was moving particularly slowly with Trump’s nominees collectively, not just his judicial nominees,” said John P. Collins Jr., a law professor at George Washington University.
Trump’s sway over the chamber was not infinite this year. Trump has called for the termination of a Senate Judiciary Committee tradition known as the “blue slip” process, which gives senators the ability to effectively block judicial nominees for district courts in their home states.
Trump wrote in a social media post that the process was “making it impossible to get great Republican Judges and U.S. Attorneys approved to serve in any state where there is even a single Democrat Senator.”
“If they say no, then it is OVER for that very well qualified Republican candidate,” Trump lamented.
But Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, gave no indication that he will waver on the tradition in a social media post about nominees.
Grassley noted the Senate confirmed more judges this year than the first year of Trump’s first term.
“As Chairman of Judic I will continue advancing/confirming I want Pres Trump’s nominees 2b successful,” Grassley said in the post.
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