While Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer‘s (D-NY) shutdown rolls on, the Senate has finally started to make progress on President Donald Trump‘s judicial nominees, after they broke through the Democrats’ monthslong slow-walking.
That means it’s time to encourage more older conservative and libertarian judges to take their well-deserved senior status and open up more vacancies for the president to fill across the judiciary. “Senior status” allows an older, experienced judge to continue working on a limited basis, while allowing a younger judge to take their place for many years to come.
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Conservatives have a deep bench, pun intended, and it’s time we make use of it and give Trump more opportunities to nominate young, constitutional conservatives to the federal court.
The Biden administration has nominated individuals to the federal bench who have shown little respect for the rule of law and appear more interested in being politicians in robes. There’s just no other way to explain Supreme Court Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, who famously could not define a woman and, more recently, has been chastised by every other member of the court, including liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, for not understanding the role of a justice.
In fact, the number of liberal, rogue judges who are playing politics or attempting to overrule Congress and the president is extremely troubling for the future of the courts.
These left-leaning judges have also been busy forcing states to continue funding Planned Parenthood, blocking state bans on transgender-related surgeries on minors, and upholding laws allowing schools to disseminate LGBT propaganda in the classroom over parental objections.
Thankfully, former President Barack Obama made a fortunate mistake when he left office, leaving numerous vacancies across the judiciary that Trump was able to fill during his first term.
Trump’s ability to fill those vacancies reshaped the judiciary in such a way that he continued to rack up legal victories, even while former President Joe Biden was in office.
It was Trump-appointed justices on the Supreme Court who were the deciding votes to return abortion regulation to the states, end race-based preferences, limit the unfettered authority of federal agencies to make their own rules, and limit the ability of a single judge to go outside his or her jurisdiction and create a nationwide injunction.
The Biden administration learned from Obama’s mistake of overlooking judicial vacancies and was much more thorough in pushing through judicial appointments before the end of Biden’s term, which means there aren’t as many open seats to fill.
That’s where the older judges come in. There are more than three dozen judges across the federal bench who are currently eligible to take senior status and open up a spot. More than a few were appointed by former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the 1980s. That’s a lot of seats we could fill with qualified, capable, and constitutionally minded jurists.
Trump now has the opportunity, and the time, and he’s off to a great start in the first nine months of his second term. In July, the Senate confirmed Whitney Hermandorfer to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit and Emil Bove to the 3rd Circuit. In early October, the Senate added Jennifer Mascott to the 3rd Circuit, and it just confirmed Rebecca Taibleson to the 7th Circuit to close out the month.
These nominations will have positive effects for decades to come, but they can’t happen if our more senior statesmen judges do not do their part by taking their senior status and riding off into the sunset.
If we want to see the rule of law protected and defended for our younger generations against a radical, left-wing agenda, we must make room across our deep conservative bench by creating empty seats and opening up more opportunities for judges we can trust to carry the mantle while we have the votes.
As a “bar association” of Republican lawyers, the Republican National Lawyers Association is pleased to see the nominees put forth so far by the Trump administration. We’d like to see even more great judges reshape the courts for decades to come.
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The Biden administration learned from Obama’s mistake in leaving so many judicial appointments on the table when he left office. In 2026, the historic headwinds of a map favoring Democrats and bias against the party in control make the Senate likely to have a smaller Republican majority in 2027. And while Republicans have a good reason to be confident of bucking that trend as Schumer and Democrats go more extreme than ever before, we can’t forget that Obama was confident that Hillary Clinton was going to win in 2016.
Older conservative judges can’t allow the same thing to happen again to Republicans and need to take senior status now.
Michael Thielen is president and executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association.