BARRETT


Democrats intend to confirm at least 15 more judges, edging Trump out for second place on the list of most single- term confirmations by any president.


GORSUCH


ending Sept. 30, 2024, and almost 40,000 new appeals landed in the appeals courts during the same peri- od. The choice of who sits on those lower courts, therefore, is almost as important as the Supreme Court. Just look at some of the cases


Paxton. A group of pornographers claim that a common-sense Texas law, also implemented by 19 other states, mandating that porn sites require age verification to access adult content is unconstitutional. The First Amendment clear-


ly does not require open access to obscenity by kids, and the Supreme Court deciding otherwise would harm both children and our society. There is no question that Trump’s


three appointments to the Supreme Court were very important. But Trump also was able to fill 54 seats on appeals courts across the coun- try and 174 judges to district courts, where criminal and civil cases begin their journey through the federal judicial system. To top it off, he also filled posi-


tions on specialty courts, where judg- es serve for specific terms, such as the Court of Federal Claims and the U.S. Tax Court. While Supreme Court nomina-


tions get a lot of attention, that court chooses to handle only about 75 of the thousands of appeals it receives each year, fewer than half of what it did as recently as the 1980s. The lower federal courts have the last word on the rest. According to the Administrative


Office of the U.S. Courts, for exam- ple, nearly 400,000 new cases were filed in the district courts in the year


handled by the federal appeals courts. In April and September 2024, respectively, the Fourth Cir- cuit (West Virginia) and Ninth Cir- cuit (Arizona) held that biological males who pretend they are females cannot be barred from participating in female athletics. The Ninth Circuit has long been notoriously political, but the Fourth Circuit was more balanced. Appoin- tees by Clinton, Obama, and Joe Biden, however, changed the com- position of the Fourth Circuit, mak- ing it one of the most activist courts in the country. Those three presidents alone appointed nine of the 15 active judg- es (and four senior judges) on the court. But who sits on district courts —


and the nominations for those posi- tions — are routinely ignored except in unusual circumstances, such as when a president picks a particu- larly unqualified or controversial nominee. Yet the district courts are the gatekeepers of the federal judicial system, able to weed out frivolous lawsuits and abusive criminal pros- ecutions. They also establish the fac- tual record that higher courts must use when decisions in those cases are appealed. All of these appointments are important, from the district courts through the appellate courts all the way up to the highest court in the land. There is no question that


between them, Obama and Biden have nominated and, unfortunately, gotten confirmed some of the most ideological, left-wing, anti-constitu- tionalists in our nation’s history. The Judicial Appointment Track-


er shows that Biden’s confirmation total to date is 220. Since losing the White House and their Senate majority, however, Democrats are determined to exceed Trump’s mark. Democrats intend to confirm at


least 15 more judges, edging Trump out for second place on the list of most single-term confirmations by any president. If they are successful, the Demo-


crats will hand Trump as few as 25 judicial vacancies to fill when he starts his second term — one-fourth the total he did the first time. Nonetheless, an average of 25


judges have taken senior status, allowing a new appointment, in six of the past several new presidents’ first terms. That process will con- tinue, and Trump’s opportunity to build on his first-term judicial appointment success will begin. Sen. Chuck Grassley will return to


chair the Judiciary Committee in the 119th Congress. The Iowa Republi- can has served on that panel since 1981 and knows how to keep the con- firmation train moving. Working with Grassley and Major-


ity Leader John Thune, R-S.D., Trump can resume appointing judg- es who take the words of the Consti- tution and statutes seriously and will once again make impartiality, not politics, their biggest priority.


Hans von Spakovsky and Thomas Jipping are senior legal fellows in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.


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