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.
This time, after Mr. Biden and his Democratic allies in the Senate topped Mr. Trump’s record on judges with 235 confirmed, the incoming administration has only three openings on the appellate courts and 43 in the trial-level district courts.
Despite the slow start, Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who chairs the Judiciary Committee and will oversee judicial confirmations, said that he “was not worried from the standpoint that there’s less vacancies than there were eight years ago.”
The administration also has prioritized filling executive branch posts and ambassadorships rather than lifetime judicial appointments.
“They’ve just been absolutely determined to get the cabinet done and obviously make progress with the big beautiful bill,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and another member of the Judiciary Committee, referring to still-developing tax and spending cut legislation. “They’ve got a lot of litigation. And then they’ve made a priority for some of the ambassadors, which I don’t have any quibble with.”
In comparison to Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden, who chaired the Judiciary Committee as a senator, made his first judicial nominations in mid-April of 2021, naming 10 candidates. Mr. Obama, who was consumed by the financial crisis in 2009, his first year in office, and was seen by some as moving too slowly on judges himself, nominated his first judge in mid-March.
During his first run for president, Mr. Trump campaigned relentlessly on his pledge to populate the courts with conservative jurists as he tried to cement his support among social conservatives who were leery of his candidacy but also historically cast their ballots with more attention to the consequences for the Supreme Court and the judiciary.
After Mr. Trump’s election, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, and Donald F. McGahn II, then his White House counsel, agreed to focus the Senate on installing as many judges with conservative credentials as possible. The judicial push became an overarching theme of Mr. Trump’s tenure.
Mr. McGahn, now in private practice, called Ms. Hermandorfer a “stellar” pick and said he was confident Mr. Trump would have second-term judicial success as well.
“President Trump is off to a strong start and it looks like he is picking up where he left off,” Mr. McGahn said.
If confirmed, Ms. Hermandorfer, a Princeton graduate who was a co-captain of the university’s women’s basketball team, would replace an Obama administration appointee on the conservative-leaning appeals court.
As director of the strategic litigation unit in the Tennessee attorney general’s office, she has argued high-profile cases, including defending the state’s abortion ban and challenging a Biden administration prohibition on discrimination against transgender students. Ms. Hermandorfer clerked for Justices Samuel A. Alito and Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court and for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when he sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
“She has a long history of working for Judges and Justices who respect the RULE OF LAW, and protect our Constitution,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Lawmakers said they expected the Trump administration to focus first on judicial vacancies in states represented by Republican senators, avoiding fights with Democrats who retain the power to block district court nominees for their states under the committee’s “blue slip” tradition. More openings also exist in those states after Republican senators balked at allowing the Biden administration to fill seats there.
Conservative activists also hope that a strong showing by the White House in naming conservative nominees could convince veteran federal judges named by previous Republican presidents to step aside and allow Mr. Trump to fill their slots with younger replacements who can spend decades more on the bench.
