Trump appointing judges at rapid pace

One reason Trump has been able to fast-track judges: His Republican Party holds a slim majority in the Senate.

Another reason is a little bit of political warfare. Republican senators blocked 36 judicial nominations in President Obama’s first five years, according to Politifact. The best-known nominee was Judge Merrick Garland, chosen to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Frustrated Senate Democrats used procedural tactics to allow most judicial confirmation votes to pass with a simple majority instead of a super-majority of 60.

“Nominations pretty much came to a halt until the start of the Trump administration when the Senate started quickly confirming his nominees,” Haire said.

Even with Trump’s rapid clip, there are more than 140 vacancies in the federal judiciary awaiting appointments.

Since taking office, Trump has appointed 12 circuit court judges – the second highest rate among any president since 1912, when the circuit court system was reformed. Although, he is behind some of his predecessors with District Court confirmations.

The number for President Kennedy is so high because Congress in 1961 approved new judgeships to ease backlogs in the federal courts.

The president has constitutional authority to nominate judges to the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals and District Courts. Judgeships at these three level are lifetime positions, also known as Article III judges. While it is ultimately the president who nominates, recommendations usually are sought from senators representing the states in question and from within the federal courts. Congress can then confirm or deny nominees by a majority vote.

Article III judges have the ability to set significant precedents over a wide array of policies and laws affecting virtually all aspect of American life — including immigration, freedom of speech and religion, and how an individual can vote.

Trump had appointed 23 Article III judges as of Jan. 17. Most of them replaced judges appointed by a Republican president; six replaced judges appointed by a Democrat.

Four of the appointments to the appellate courts replaced appointees by Democratic presidents – two from Jimmy Carter and two from Bill Clinton. Two of the appointments to the District Courts replaced Obama appointees.

How Trump's nominees stack up

Four of Trump’s nominees so far have been rated not qualified by the American Bar Assn.’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary. That’s 6.1% of his nominees, far more than recent presidents.

Nearly every presidential administration since 1953 has sought out the ABA’s assessments before deciding who to nominate to the federal bench. President George W. Bush is the only other president besides Trump to ignore the ratings.

Republican leadership recently criticized the ABA’s ratings as partisan, despite the group saying its review process is independent.

ABA scores are based on assessments of a candidate’s “integrity, professional competence and judicial temperament” not on their politics or ideologies, according to the committee’s guidelines. The assessments include examining questionnaires candidates fill out, legal writings, and interviews with the nominee as well as colleagues and others in the legal field.

The vetting process, no matter how thorough and precise the ABA claims to be, isn’t without fault. U.S. District Court judge nominee Matthew S. Petersen was rated as “Qualified” despite being unable to answer basic questions about law when Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) questioned him at his confirmation hearing.

Petersen later withdrew his nomination. The White House was forced to withdraw two other nominees due to insufficient vetting. Leonard Steven Grasz is the only Article III judge to be confirmed who was rated "Not Qualified" by the ABA.

Of the 23 confirmed judges, only nine have previous judicial experience and most have backgrounds in litigation in either private practice or government.

While some of the judges were questioned for conservative opinions they’ve expressed in the past, the question of how they will individually affect the courts remains.

“There is no doubt that his nominees are generally conservative,” said Columbia Law School professor Jamal Greene. “There is also no way of measuring that question objectively, since the majority of them have no prior judicial experience.”