Emory Law Professor Jonathan Nash writes in The Hill today on President Trump’s other judicial nomination — not Neil Gorsuch, but 47-year-old federal district Judge Amul Thapar of Kentucky, whom he has just quietly nominated to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Thapar, who is of Indian descent, was the first American of South Asian extraction to be appointed to the federal bench in 2008. He is on Trump’s famous list of judges he’d consider appointing to the Supreme Court. Nash notes that this promotion, early in the Trump presidency, “lends support to the idea that Thapar is a front-runner for a second Supreme Court vacancy, were one to open.”
The very thought of Trump appointing an “Indian judge” might be amusing given his previous comments on other judges‘ heritage. But you could view it as his way of softening one of his most divisive and outrageous comments during the 2016 election cycle.
Trump already has the opportunity to replace about 136 judges who have either retired or are scheduled to retire. That’s about 16 percent of the federal judiciary that’s either currently vacant or scheduled to be vacant. And his lower court nominations could arguably be more transformative than Gorsuch’s nomination, which will merely preserve the high court’s status quo.
