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The president named his first appeals court candidate this week, but fewer vacancies and other priorities have led to a lack of judicial nominations from the White House so far.
By Carl Hulse
Carl Hulse reports on Congress and has written a book on Senate judicial confirmations and increasing partisanship around the selection of federal judges.
May 2, 2025, 1:47 p.m. ET
After an aggressive drive to reshape the federal judiciary during his first stint in the White House, President Trump is moving more slowly so far this time, waiting more than three months into his second term to announce his first judicial nominee this week.
In a social media post late Thursday, the president said he had chosen Whitney Hermandorfer, a lawyer in the Tennessee attorney general’s office, for a vacant seat on the Cincinnati-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He called the former Supreme Court clerk “a Fighter who will inspire confidence in our Legal System.”
The president starts his second term with far less opportunity to install judicial picks than he did eight years ago, when he was handed more than 100 vacancies after Senate Republicans stalled President Barack Obama’s court picks during the last two years of his term. Currently, there are just over 40 federal court vacancies after the Democratic-controlled Senate pushed to fill as many seats as possible before President Joseph R. Biden Jr. left office.
Senators said they believed more Trump nominations were imminent and have encouraged the White House to pick up the pace.
“I’ve been urging them to get a move on,” said Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican and member of the Judiciary Committee. “I've said to them over and over again, ‘We’ve had a lot of vacancies in Missouri for a long time now and we really need to fill them.’ ”
By this point in Mr. Trump’s first term in 2017, the Senate had already confirmed a new Supreme Court justice, Mr. Trump had nominated an appeals court judge and several other prominent judicial nominees were in the queue to be announced within days after he made placing conservatives on the federal courts a centerpiece of his first campaign. By the end of his first presidency, Mr. Trump had named two other Supreme Court justices and the Republican-controlled Senate had confirmed a total of 234 federal judges.
