The Surprising Trend That Hampered Trump’s Ability To Confirm Judges In 2025
HuffPost
The president got a decent number of his nominees confirmed to lifetime federal judgeships. But some sitting judges seem reluctant to let Trump replace them.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump had a pretty good run in 2025 when it came to confirming judges. Republicans control the Senate and rubber-stamped most of his court picks, confirming a total of 25 lifetime federal judges. That’s more than Trump got by this point in his first term (19), though not as many as former President Joe Biden (40).
But the president was also hampered by a surprising new trend among sitting judges: They’re not retiring when they’re eligible to do so, and in effect, they’ve been denying Trump the ability to fill more vacancies with his picks.
Since Trump won reelection, only 30 court vacancies have been announced, says John Collins, an associate professor at The George Washington University Law School who specializes in judicial nominations. Of those, 27 are on district courts and just three are on appeals courts, a more powerful tier of courts that often has the final say in federal lawsuits.
Compare those numbers to the roughly 70 court vacancies that opened up during this same period in Biden’s first year in office — more than twice as many.
Part of the reason there aren’t as many vacancies to fill is because Trump and Biden both appointed huge numbers of judges over the last eight years, leaving a smaller pool of retirement-eligible judges. But another reason is almost certainly that some judges simply don’t trust Trump to replace them with a qualified pick, given his record of putting far-right ideologues, loyalists and otherwise unqualified people onto the federal bench.
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