President Trump ran in 2016 with a promise to transform the country’s courts. And in less than four years, it’s one that he has kept, successfully running a record number of nominees through the Senate’s confirmation process.
In Trump’s one term, the Senate confirmed all three of his Supreme Court picks. By the end of 2020, the Republican-led body will have confirmed 234 of his Article III judicial nominees, 54 appeals court nominees, and 174 district court nominees. His performance sets several records for a one-term president.
In less than four years, Trump was able to nominate as many judges to the Supreme Court as his predecessor Barack Obama — and, unlike Obama, secure all three confirmations with the help of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Trump leaves behind a judiciary that is fundamentally different, and more conservative, than the one he encountered when he took office.
“Over the last four years, President Trump completely reshaped the federal judiciary by confirming conservative, rule-of-law minded judges who adhere strictly to the Constitution,” said Adam Piper, executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association, noting that Trump picked nearly a quarter of his judges from conservatives already tested by some form of in public office.
The judiciary’s rightward swing is most immediately visible at the Supreme Court, where the addition of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett brought an originalist understanding of the Constitution to the high court and a 6-3 conservative majority. All three were drawn from public lists put together by the Federalist Society, a society of originalist lawyers, many of whose members landed nominations.
Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch are all relatively young (none older than 55) and with lifetime appointments are expected to keep the Supreme Court in conservative territory for a long time to come.
“A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election,” McConnell said after the Senate confirmed Barrett in October. “They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”
Trump’s success with the Supreme Court hinged mainly on McConnell’s political maneuvering. The Kentucky senator in 2016 kept the seat left vacant by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death open, blocking Obama’s appointment of D.C. Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland and allowing Trump to put up Justice Neil Gorsuch the next year. McConnell held Senate Republicans together in 2018 when Kavanaugh faced accusations of sexual assault from his high school days. And as the 2020 election drew near, McConnell pushed through Barrett’s nomination only weeks before more than 80 million people voted against the president.
Since Barrett’s addition to the court, the body’s conservative bent became apparent almost immediately. In a case decided the day before Thanksgiving, the court found that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s coronavirus orders restricting churches and synagogues more strictly than surrounding businesses placed an unfair burden on houses of worship. The decision marked a sharp turn from similar cases over the summer when the court refused several times to take up pandemic-related religious freedom cases.
Trump and McConnell’s success trickled down beneath the Supreme Court as well. The duo’s 54 appellate judges, the pool of jurists from which Supreme Court judges are typically picked, marked the most people confirmed to those seats since President Jimmy Carter, who benefited from the fact that the courts were being expanded during his administration. The effect of this is that, like the Supreme Court, these high-level federal courts are now overwhelmingly conservative.
In one of the most dramatic examples, McConnell and Trump hacked away at the Left’s hold on California’s 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court, once a liberal bastion, now only has three left-leaning members among its 11 judges. This summer. it demonstrated its new attitude when the court struck down a California gun control law banning high-capacity magazines, previously unthinkable.
The two also flipped Florida’s 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, a move that also altered the way it decided cases. This fall, the court struck down a local ban on conversion therapy, a treatment in which doctors counsel gay or transgender people to accept identities that they have rejected. Barbara Lagoa, a judge whom Trump considered for the Supreme Court seat which Barrett now occupies, cast one of the decisive votes.
Liberal activists have fought Trump’s nominations and McConnell’s confirmations the entire way, especially after Barrett ascended to the court. As the Biden the administration takes shape, a collection of left-leaning court reform groups in December kicked off a push to expand the courts and lessen the longevity of Trump’s influence.
Most Democratic leaders, however, have punted on the issue, with President-elect Joe Biden largely deflecting questions about court-packing. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat, shortly after the election, shot down the idea by saying that he had no plans to support any court expansions.
As Trump leaves office then, he’s put an indelible mark on the government’s judiciary branch — at least for the foreseeable future. Michael Moreland, a professor of law and religion at Villanova University, called the achievement “one of the most pointed” legacies of the Trump administration.
“They really pushed those judges through,” he said. “That is a remarkable success story for the administration.”
