Free Republic

When all of life is reduced to racial struggle, adoptive families are a threat. When rumors suggested Friday that President Donald Trump was set to nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, a particularly vile line of attack began to emerge from leftist activists and blue checkmarks on Twitter. While some of these tweets were later deleted or walked back, the left had tipped its hand: Barrett’s two young, adopted children are not considered out-of-bounds for witch hunts and smears. Nor was this line of questioning limited to Twitter, according to Diane Kunz of the Center for Adoption...

A vigil speaker declared that her organization and its allies would do whatever it takes to keep the Senate from holding hearings on a new Trump nominee, no matter who it is. In the wake of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death Friday, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) quickly signaled how vicious the last two months of this election season will be.Both senators spoke at a vigil for Ginsburg Saturday night. The vigil was organized by Demand Justice, the group that led the charge against Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, as well as a coalition of leftist activist...

The next president will likely solidify a lasting majority on the courts of appeals, either cementing President Trump’s judicial legacy or largely undoing it. Our nation’s courts are nearing a tipping point. During President Trump’s first term, he has achieved a slim conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court (5 of 9) and has evened the score in the critically important federal courts of appeals, which are the final stop for more than 99 percent of all federal appeals.Now, data compiled by the Article III Project (A3P) shows that the next president will likely solidify a lasting majority on the...

Donald Trump’s most lasting legacy will be his appointments to the federal bench. In his tenure so far, the Senate has confirmed 193 judges, 51 of whom were circuit judges. All were nominated by President Trump. Indeed, President Trump and the Senate have confirmed federal appellate judges faster than any other president in U.S. history. For all judges, President Trump’s rate is the second fastest. The Senate returns to Washington next week, and on the agenda is another stellar judicial nominee, Judge Justin Walker. Walker is the quintessential Trump appointee. He’s young, he has impeccable legal credentials, and he has...

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Wednesday joined a growing chorus of Democrats calling on Senate Republicans to pause their efforts to confirm federal judges when the Senate returns on May 4 amid the coronavirus pandemic, saying the GOP seems less interested in passing further measures to combat the virus than they are in putting more of President Trump's nominees on the federal bench. "The GDP just had its biggest drop since the Great Recession, the United States has surpassed one million confirmed positive cases of COVID-19, and we still don’t have adequate testing," Schumer said in a statement....

Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox. Sign up here. President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are pushing ahead with an aggressive effort to get more federal judges confirmed amid the global coronavirus pandemic, as they grapple with the possibility that the November elections could wrest away Republican control of the Senate and White House. Losing the White House or control of the Senate would be a major blow to efforts to install conservative jurists on the federal bench, as the president nominates judicial nominees and the Senate confirms them....

Today, President Donald J. Trump announced his intent to nominate:J. Philip Calabrese of Ohio, to serve as Judge on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.Philip Calabrese currently serves as a Judge on the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas.  Before taking the bench in 2019, Judge Calabrese was a partner at Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur, LLP, where he co-chaired the firm’s class action practice.  Judge Calabrese also serves as an adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.  Upon graduation from law school, Judge Calabrese served as a law clerk to Judge...

Minutes after Chief Justice John Roberts gaveled out President Trump's impeachment trial, which had consumed the Senate for almost three weeks, Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., got right back to what he's said is his top priority -- confirming judges. Less than half-an-hour after TV networks cut away from the Senate to dive into the ramifications of the body acquitting Trump, McConnell filed cloture on the nomination of Judge Andrew Brasher to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, a procedural step that moved the controversial nominee one step closer to confirmation. The body took the next step to confirming...

With a Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, Donald Trump has been remaking the judiciary with record speed. Approximately 25 percent of circuit court judges are Trump appointees, and Democrats just can't stand that. It seems that throughout Trump's presidency they've come up with various unconstitutional schemes to thwart Trump's ability to make his mark on the judicial branch of our federal government. ~snip~ Now that the Democrats' partisan impeachment has reached the Senate, failed 2020 presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Kamala Harris is making a similar argument to put the brakes on Trump's making the judiciary great again. “Today,...

President Trump is closing the year by increasing his already transformative impact on the federal judiciary, with 13 of his district court nominees receiving confirmation this month. That brings Trump’s total to 102 federal judges confirmed in 2019. Over the course of his administration, that total jumps to 187, including 50 to circuit courts of appeal and two Supreme Court justices. "In terms of quality and quantity, we are going to be just about No. 1 by the time we finish -- No. 1 of any president, any administration," Trump said in early November, noting that George Washington may have...

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...

The senators who are most likely to reject President Trump's nominees are the very ones who want to challenge him in 2020. The Hill's review of two-and-a-half years of vote totals shows Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) voted against more Trump nominees than any other senator. At the same time, Republicans voted virtually in lock step for Trump's nominees; the average GOP senator backed 99 percent of his picks, and the one who went rogue most often -- Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) -- still voted to confirm 93 percent of his nominees. Trump's picks...

It may come as no shock that Democratic senators currently running for president have opposed nearly all of President Trump’s judicial nominees this year -- but newly reported voting data shows some of those same lawmakers backed a surprising number of the president's court picks before the election season began. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for example, voted in favor of 46 percent of Trump’s nominees from 2017-2018, according to data compiled by Demand Justice. Yet the figures, obtained and reported by Politico, show that in 2019, that number shrank to zero. Two other 2020 candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and...

It just takes a cursory look at the ages of current Supreme Court justice to notice that Democrats have a distinct disadvantage, for now. That’s because its two oldest justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 86 and Stephen Breyer at 80, are both long past the time when normal working folks typically trade in their work boots for fedoras and beach sandals.But SCOTUS is no ordinary job, and these are not ordinary times. Both Ginsburg and Breyer know the politics behind any potential retirement plans, and both are doubtless planning to cling to their jobs like a pair of good dentures until...

<p>WASHINGTON — Mitch McConnell says the Senate will be in the “personnel business” this year. But the majority leader’s focus on confirming President Donald Trump’s nominees is coming at the expense of any big legislative priorities.</p> <p>Nearly 100 days into the new Congress, the drive to confirm is adding more conservatives to the courts and putting more Trump appointees in government offices. But Trump’s promises to replace the Affordable Care Act, invest in infrastructure or cut middle class taxes have been essentially shelved.</p>

Senate Republicans are poised to advance a resolution next week to drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to confirm hundreds of President Trump's nominees as Republicans mull going "nuclear" to muscle through the change. Under the resolution introduced by Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the chairman of the Rules Committee, most nominees would only be subjected to up to two hours of debate after they clear an initial hurdle. Currently, nominees are subjected to up to 30 hours of additional debate after proving they have the simple majority needed to defeat a filibuster and be...

President Trump announced Tuesday his intent to renominate 51 of his judicial nominees, who didn’t see confirmation votes during the last Congress and whose nominations had expired at the end of last year. Out of the 51 picks for the federal bench, nine were for federal circuit court vacancies including Neomi J. Rao, who was tapped to fill Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s old seat on the D.C. Circuit. Liberal groups have already vowed to oppose her nomination. Ms. Rao, who works in the White House budget office, came under scrutiny after several news outlets reported earlier this month about college...

President Trump announced six new picks for federal district court seats Wednesday in what was his first slate of judicial nominees released since the start of the new Congress this year. ~snip~ The new nominees announced Wednesday include Louisiana Supreme Court Judge Greg Guidry for the Eastern District of Louisiana, James W. Hendrix and Mark T. Pittman for the Northern District of Texas, Sean D. Jordan for the Eastern District of Texas, Michael T. Liburdi for the District of Arizona, and Peter D. Welte for the District of North Dakota.

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MI) won her runoff election last night over Democrat Mike Espy in Mississippi, so Republicans have a solid 53-47 majority. No longer will we have to deal with the Murkowski-Collins question when it come sot tight votes of judicial and Supreme Court nominations. We can run the table on paper, but we have a Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) problem. Yeah, Mr. Flake, the perpetual pain in the rear end of the Senate GOP, isn’t budging from his position of blocking Trump’s judicial nominees until a vote on a bill to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the...

Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, both members of the Judiciary Committee, called on the White House Monday to make a deal to fill court vacancies. ~snip~ They offered accepting Judge James Rogan, a Trump pick, as long as their choice — Judge Lucy Koh — is also confirmed. They also proposed that each party select a nominee from the other’s list to confirm.