CNN
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Former supporters and detractors President Donald Trump I agree that the landmark achievement of his first term would shape the American legal and political landscape for decades to come.
“I completely changed the federal judiciary,” Trump boasted at a summit hosted by the right-wing Moms Liberty group last summer. “Many presidents do not get the chance to appoint a Supreme Court judge. I had three and they were gold.
That claim, the numbers show, is no exaggeration. As president, Trump named 234 judicial nominees to positions Among the most important benches Nationwide, including 54 who reshaped the ideological makeup of federal appeals courts and three who made a generational change on the land’s highest court.
But Trump is driving toward a A possible second term, one thing is clear: He’s just getting started. A reality that thrills supporters — and even scares a few right-wing legal scholars.
“I fear that in a second term, you’ll see President-elect Trump increase the political vetting of prospective judges and seek out people who are more loyal to him personally or to the Republican Party in general,” Greg Nunciata said. executive director of the conservative Society for the Rule of Law and former counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee told CNN.
It is a fear President Joe Biden November was a major concern.
“That’s one of the scariest parts of it,” he said at a star-studded Los Angeles fundraiser last month when asked about Trump’s potential court nominees. “Look, the Supreme Court has never been like it is today.”
Trump campaign officials and allies have made clear that a victory in November would set the stage for what they see as an increasingly Republican flip of the Senate and a renewed — and more Trumpian — brand on the courts.
“I will re-appoint a solid line of conservative justices to do what they’re supposed to do in the form of Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, a great man, and another great man, Clarence Thomas,” Trump promised a cheering crowd at Family Research. Council’s Pray Vote Stand summit in September. This is more than what he promised in 2016 and again in 2020 and delivered.
Alito and Thomas aren’t just important to Trump as models for future judicial picks. Many of the former president’s allies see that one or both could step aside because of age — and give Trump a chance to cement the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority for a generation.
Trump, who relied heavily on the long-standing Republican legal philosophy and advice of the conservative Federalist Society during his first term, has made it clear he’ll push right in a second.
“From both the positions taken by his own lawyers in the case, and what the administration has tried to do before and the radical proposals in Plan 2025, it’s clear that there is a far-right effort in this country to operate in a post-constitutional paradigm,” Democratic Forward President Skye Berryman told CNN. (Project 2025 (This is a policy playbook for a second Trump term produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation.)
Trump is more than his support 2016 Campaign Promises Nominating conservatives to federal judiciary, competing with confirmed nominees of presidents who served twice as long as he did.
But legal scholars note that the number of Trump nominees alone has had a dramatic impact on the judiciary. Who he nominated would reverberate for decades.
“We want people in their 30s so they’ve been around for 50 years or 40 years,” Trump said at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Dallas in May.
While Trump’s three Supreme Court picks — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanagh and Amy Coney Barrett — aren’t in their 30s, they were under 55 when he nominated them to the bench. Younger than the average nominee, each may have decades to shape judgments and policies across the country.
But the main common denominator among all of Trump’s picks is not their age, but their conservative credentials.
“Will you assure the voters tonight that religious freedom will be an absolute litmus test for whoever you appoint?” conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump in a 2016 Republican primary debate. “Not just for the Supreme Court, but for all courts?”
“Yes, I will,” Trump replied without hesitation.
That promise helped solidify support for Trump’s candidacy from skeptical Republicans after Scalia’s February 2016 death.
Once in the White House, Trump relied heavily on the advice of advisers and outside groups to fill open seats with the help of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who was eager to ensure conservative dominance in the nation’s courts.
“You know what my top priority is. I have made it very clear. It’s the judiciary,” McConnell told reporters halfway through Trump’s term. “We want to confirm as many as we can until we’re in a position to do that.”
Trump works with the Republican-controlled Senate 6-3 confirmed the conservative majority In the Supreme Court. The result is dramatic — Trump is no longer in the Oval Office. Roe v. Wade is overturned. EPA and other federal agencies are stripped of regulatory authority. Affirmative action has ended in college admissions. And, in a case very personal to Trump, a court ruling was handed down to the president earlier this month Almost total immunity While in office.
Trump helped conservatives flip three of the nation’s 13 appeals courts, which play a significant legal role in shaping policy across the country. One of Trump’s district court picks — judge Eileen Cannon – is now in charge of overseeing his classified documents case in Florida.
Trump’s allies and opponents alike point to a less understood but clear shift in the makeup of Trump’s nominations during his first term: in his first two years away from candidates backed by the powerful conservative legal establishment and toward lawyers who embraced more expansive and sometimes legally weak views of executive power.
“Some of Trump’s judicial appointees are really pushing the envelope in an ideological way,” said Donald P. Iyer told CNN. “They do things because that’s the end they want to achieve, and not how the legal system should work. It shouldn’t be primarily driven to achieve a given end.
It’s a legal philosophy aggressively and financially structured in the years since Trump left office by outside teams filled with former Trump officials and lawyers. As ex-officio made Outside the policy infrastructure Around Trump’s campaign, there have been efforts to do so on the legal front.
The groups have repeatedly sued the Biden administration and pushed for investigations into the administration’s actions. But they have also served as an unofficial bulwark in defense of Trump’s own legal troubles.
“Look, once this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I’ll have every right to go after them,” Trump said of his political opponents in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity last month.
Retaliation could set up a similar bar to appointments and executive attorneys for a second Trump term.
“I’m not saying we should be a mafia,” Will Chamberlain, a senior adviser to the conservative Article III program and a former adviser to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, said at the National Conservative Convention in Washington this week. “But as a political party, if we’re not ready to release anything, we can be expected to take it.”
Some in Trump’s circle have even suggested expanding the fight even further — trying to remove sitting judges John EastmanThe architect of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election spoke to a conservative DC crowd.
“We need to start impeaching these judges for being incredibly biased off the bench,” Eastman said.
