Washington Post: How Trump could reshape the judiciary (again)
This excerpt is from a piece that originally ran on November 18, 2024.
More vacancies will open up as eligible judges take senior status, allowing them to continue serving with a reduced caseload but freeing Trump to nominate their successors.
Eighty-six district and circuit court judges nominated by Republican presidents will be eligible to take senior status by the end of next year, according to Vasu Abhiraman, the Helen Rosenthal Building the Bench director at the Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group. (The idea is that Republican-nominated judges are more likely to want Trump to pick their successors than Democrats are.)
If all of them take senior status, Trump would have at least 122 vacancies to fill in his first year.
But not all of the Republican-nominated judges eligible to take senior status did so when Trump took office in 2017, and it’s unlikely they will this time around.
Trump will face another hurdle in winning confirmation of some of his nominees: the “blue slip,” which allows individual senators to block district court nominees in their states.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) resisted pressure to kill the blue slip to confirm more of Biden’s nominees. Democrats will be able to wield blue slips on Trump’s picks if Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the incoming Judiciary Committee chair, doesn’t do away with them. Two dozen district court vacancies and potential vacancies during Trump’s first year are in states with at least one Democratic senator, according to Abhiraman.