Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate Harry Reid speaks in Washington, D.C., Mar. 25, 2014. USDA photo by Lance Cheung
The media is so obsessed with Donald Trump’s twittering that it is can’t see the big picture. That is, what is happening in the federal judiciary. To date, President Trump has nominated “nearly 60 judges, filling more vacancies than Barack Obama did in his entire first year,” Kimberley Strassel informs readers in the WSJ.
The president is stocking the courts with a class of brilliant young textualists bearing little relation to even their Reagan or Bush predecessors. Mr. Trump’s nastygrams to Bob Corker will be a distant memory next week. Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett’s influence on the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could still be going strong 40 years from now.
This project is the work of Mr. Trump, White House Counsel Don McGahn and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Every new president cares about the judiciary, but no administration in memory has approached appointments with more purpose than this team.
Harry Reid’s 2013 decision to blow up the filibuster for judicial nominees has freed the Trump White House from having to worry about a Democratic veto during confirmation. Mr. McGahn’s team (loaded with former Clarence Thomas clerks) has carte blanche to work with outside groups like the Federalist Society to tap the most conservative judges.
Furthermore, in Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Jodi Ernst, Deb Fischer, Dan Sullivan, Cory Gardner, Marco Rubio, and Tom Cotton, the country has a new generation of Republican senators. “They are reformers, far removed from the earmarking, logrolling, crony, backroom days of washed-out Republicans who inspired the tea party.”
The media has been so blinded by President Trump’s “shinny objects” tweets that it has missed the extraordinary class of judicial nominees coming through the ranks. “Government is being redone.”
Read more from Ms. Strassel here.
