Winning!
“…As the fight over Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court unfolded this summer, consuming most of the oxygen available for judge-related punditry and spurring millions of dollars in ad spending by outside groups, the Senate confirmed more than two dozen of President Donald Trump’s judicial picks to lifetime appointments with little fanfare.
Twenty-six federal appeals and district court judges secured seats on the federal bench in the two months since Trump announced Kavanaugh as his latest Supreme Court nominee. That’s more than the number of judges confirmed in the first half of the year, and more than the number of judges confirmed in all of 2017.
Getting a second justice confirmed to the Supreme Court is a legacy-defining priority for the Trump administration. That White House counsel Don McGahn and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell managed to also pick up the pace on lower court judges while shepherding through Kavanaugh’s high-profile and contentious nomination underscores their shared drive to transform the entire federal judiciary while Republicans have the numbers in the Senate to do so.
The latest batch of newly confirmed judges includes five appeals court nominees. Only a small fraction of cases make it up to the Supreme Court, so the White House and Senate Republicans have placed a premium on getting seats filled on the circuit courts, where most cases end. Democrats over the summer agreed to expedite votes on 21 district court judges — a mix of nominees from red and blue states — to the dismay of liberals who want Democrats to use what limited tools they have left to hold up Trump’s picks. Two of the new district court judges received rare “not qualified” ratings from the American Bar Association…”