President Trump’s judicial nominees have faced unprecedented opposition from the Senate in his first two-and-a-half years in office, records show, with Democratic senators voting against potential judges in higher numbers than at any point in American history.
Trump’s nominees for the lower courts that feed cases — and sometimes judges — to the U.S. Supreme Court contend with far more ‘no’ votes and delay tactics than any past president’s, according to numbers compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation. As the Senate moved last week to confirm 13 more of Trump’s district court nominees, Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., blasted Democrats for delaying routine appointments.
“For too long, thoroughly uncontroversial judicial nominees just like these have been held up and delayed by our Democratic colleagues,” he said on the Senate floor. “Uncontroversial district judges used to be confirmed promptly in big groups by voice vote. These days, in a kind of protest theater, our colleagues across the aisle usually insist that we hold a cloture vote and then a rollcall confirmation vote on each one.”
From George Washington’s presidency through Barack Obama’s, just 6 percent of judges for U.S. District Court, U.S. Circuit Court and the U.S. Supreme Court received even a single ‘no’ vote, according to the Heritage Foundation. Trump’s picks are opposed by at least one senator 71 percent of the time.
For a more recent comparison, to this point in his first term, 48.6 percent of confirmed Trump nominees for Article III courts – the federal courts mentioned above plus the U.S. Court of International Trade – were opposed by more than a quarter of voting senators. Just 2.1 percent of Obama’s nominees and 2.8 percent of George W. Bush’s nominees faced such close votes. On appointments to circuit courts specifically, that number jumps to 88.4 percent for Trump. It was under 12 percent for both Bush and Obama. – READ MORE