President Trump's most enduring and significant legacy will almost surely be the judges he has appointed and will appoint during the remainder of his term. These are lifetime positions, and the president's selections will reshape the direction of the courts for at least the next two generations.
There's been a lot of attention focused on the upcoming hearings for SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh, but almost as important as the Supreme Court are the Federal Circuit Courts of Appeals.
The Circuit Court consists of 13 appellate courts distributed throughout the country and staffed by 179 judges. The role of these courts is to reexamine cases appealed from district courts, and their decisions become binding precedent across their jurisdiction.
Cases can be appealed from the Court of Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, but since the Supreme Court accepts only about one percent of the cases filed with them, the Court of Appeals has the final say in 99 percent of cases which come before it. This amounts to thousands of decisions each year.
President Trump has made a total of 26 appointments to the appellate courts since taking office. No other president in the history of the United States has appointed so many circuit court judges at this point in his presidency, and his achievement is all the more impressive given that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has tried his best to stall the judicial appointment process, insisting on a full 30 hours of floor debate for all nominees.
So, why do President Trump's judges matter?
During the 2016 campaign, liberal journalist and Hillary Clinton supporter Matthew Yglesias observed that a President Hillary Clinton would appoint “judges who’ll be systematically more sympathetic to criminal defendants, labor and environmental plaintiffs, and government regulators.” This would, he wrote, turn “the federal judiciary back into a powerful prop of progressive governance.”
In other words, Mrs. Clinton would've appointed jurists who would see it as their task to usurp the role of the legislature and make law rather than interpret it.
But the judges President Trump has appointed have a conservative legal philosophy that makes them inclined to limit government power and respect the original intent of the framers of the Constitution.
This means that we'll gradually see a shift in judicial philosophy from judges basing their decisions on whatever might be the reigning political fashion of the day to a deeper regard for the rights enshrined in the Constitution. We should become once more a nation of laws rather than of ideological judges imposing their arbitrary convictions on the rest of us.
And because the average age of Mr. Trump’s circuit court nominees last year was 49, and since they have lifetime appointments, their influence should last for a very long time.
There are still 12 more vacancies on the U.S. Court of Appeals to be filled and doubtless more to come, but meanwhile, the president is enjoying similar success in the next lower level court, the District Courts, where he has already appointed dozens of judges.
The District Courts have 677 judges and are currently beset by 119 vacancies. Those numbers provide ample opportunity to reshape those courts for a long time to come as well.
