Donald Trump used his visit this week to the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland to speak further to the matter of judicial selection for the Supreme Court. Last May the candidate said he would name judicial conservatives to the Court, and he released a list of 11 such jurists, all of them either federal or state judges.
Trump did not say, however, that he would in fact pick from the list in filling Scalia’s seat or others that might come open during his presidency. Instead Trump said he planned to use the list “as a guide” for the kind of Justices, with respect to judicial philosophy, he’d nominate. Thus, Trump might pick as a nominee one of the judges on his list, but he also might choose someone not on the list but clearly an adherent of a conservative approach to judging.
At the New Spirit Revival Center, according to National Public Radio‘s Sarah McCammon, Trump said that he was adding nine more judges to his list, though he did not provide any names. Thus the Trump Eleven is currently in the process of becoming the Trump Twenty. The candidate also said that his nominees would actually come from the list—and nowhere else—a change in his position that could prove too confining.
Update: The Trump campaign has released the names of those it is adding to the list. It turns out that there are ten, so the Trump Eleven is now the Trump Twenty-One.
