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BumRushDaShow

(157,286 posts) Tue Jul 15, 2025, 01:44 PM Jul 15

Senate confirms Trump's first judicial nominee of his second term

Source: Nashua Telegraph/AP

Jul 15, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has confirmed President Donald Trump’s first judicial pick of his second term, voting to approve Whitney Hermandorfer as a judge for the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The confirmation of Hermandorfer, who worked for Tennessee’s attorney general, comes after the Democratic-led Senate under former President Joe Biden confirmed 235 federal judges and the Republican-led Senate in Trump’s first term confirmed 234 federal judges.

The two presidents each worked to reshape the judiciary, with Trump taking advantage of a high number of judicial vacancies at the end of President Barack Obama’s term and Democrats working to beat Trump’s number after he had the opportunity to nominate three Supreme Court justices.

So far in his second term, Trump has fewer vacancies to fill. While he inherited more than 100 vacancies from Obama, who was stymied by a Republican Senate in his final two years, Trump now has 49 vacancies to fill out of almost 900 federal judgeships. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said last week that the Senate would work to quickly confirm Trump’s judicial nominees, even though “we’re not facing the number of judicial vacancies this Congress we did during Trump’s first term.”

Hermandorfer, who was confirmed 46-42 along party lines, has defended many of Trump’s policies as director of strategic litigation for Tennessee’s attorney general, including his bid to end birthright citizenship. Democrats and liberal judicial advocacy groups criticized her as extreme on that issue and others, also citing her office’s defense of the state’s strict abortion ban.

Read more: https://www.nashuatelegraph.com/top-headlines/2025/07/15/senate-confirms-trumps-first-judicial-nominee-of-his-second-term/

Slid under the radar...

Senate Roll Call - https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1191/vote_119_1_00384.htm

(No (D) "YEAs" and 12 Not Voting, with 7 (R)s and 5 (D)s in that category)

4 replies

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Highlight:

Senate confirms Trump's first judicial nominee of his second term (Original Post) BumRushDaShow Jul 15 OP

America is over because certain folks on the left just couldn't help themselves Eliot Rosewater Jul 15 #1

Is this guy a real judge? Aristus Jul 15 #2

Not a guy, but a 38 year old woman, and is now federal judge (but a not judge before) Polybius Jul 15 #3

Maddow Blog-Republicans confirm the first judge of Trump's second term -- and she's a doozy LetMyPeopleVote Jul 16 #4

Eliot Rosewater

(33,249 posts)

1. America is over because certain folks on the left just couldn't help themselves

Reply to BumRushDaShow (Original post)

Tue Jul 15, 2025, 01:54 PM

Jul 15

Aristus

(70,481 posts)

2. Is this guy a real judge?

Reply to BumRushDaShow (Original post)

Tue Jul 15, 2025, 01:58 PM

Jul 15

Or just some incompetent, nose-picking Trump loyalist who has seen every episode of "Judging Amy"?

Polybius

(20,600 posts)

3. Not a guy, but a 38 year old woman, and is now federal judge (but a not judge before)

Reply to Aristus (Reply #2)

Tue Jul 15, 2025, 03:14 PM

Jul 15

Whitney Hermandorfer, born Whitney Dianne Downs in 1987 in Clearwater, Florida, earned her undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 2009, graduating summa cum laude with a concentration in sociology. She went on to receive her Juris Doctor from George Washington University Law School in 2015, where she served as editor-in-chief of The George Washington Law Review and was awarded the John Bell Larner Award for achieving the highest cumulative GPA in her class.

Following law school, Hermandorfer began her legal career at the Washington, D.C., firm Williams & Connolly, where she worked as an associate specializing in appellate and administrative law.

Hermandorfer previously served as director of strategic litigation for the Tennessee attorney general, where she defended several of Trump's policies, including efforts to end birthright citizenship and support for the state's near-total abortion ban.

Critics of Hermandorfer's nomination have pointed to her limited courtroom experience — she graduated from law school just ten years ago — and what they view as a deeply ideological background.

Her record drew sharp criticism from Democrats and progressive legal groups, who labeled her views extreme and pointed to her office's defense of Tennessee's stringent abortion ban. Prior to that role, Hermandorfer clerked for three conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices — Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-judicial-pick-whitney-hermandorfer-sixth-circuit-senate-2098922

LetMyPeopleVote

(166,920 posts)

4. Maddow Blog-Republicans confirm the first judge of Trump's second term -- and she's a doozy

Reply to BumRushDaShow (Original post)

Wed Jul 16, 2025, 01:52 PM

Jul 16

Whitney Hermandorfer is the first far-right judicial nominee to be confirmed during the president’s second term, and she won’t be the last.

Trump set out to put â€œunapologetically combative, MAGA-friendlyâ€ conservatives on the federal bench.

Senate Republicans are already playing their role, rubberstamping the first of many unqualified nominees. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...
— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-07-15T13:06:14.845Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-judges-whitney-hermandorfer-rcna218823

Looking back, however, the president and his team aren’t altogether satisfied. The problem, evidently, is that some conservative, Trump-appointed jurists — many of them handpicked by the conservative Federalist Society — are not quite radical enough. Some have even had the audacity to issue rulings that Republicans didn’t like.

For Team Trump, this became a learning experience of sorts. Sure, his other successful judicial nominees were conservative, but not enough of them were knee-jerk conservatives who could be counted on to deliver for the right reflexively and without a lot of fuss or forethought. As NBC News reported last month, the president settled on “a new approach to selecting judges in his second term, departing from his first-term formula of younger up-and-comers, elite credentials and pedigrees in traditional conservative ideology and instead leaning toward unapologetically combative, MAGA-friendly nominees.”

It’s precisely why Team Trump decided that the Federalist Society simply wasn’t MAGA-aligned enough. In fact, a year before Election Day 2024, The New York Times reported that Team Trump had begun looking at Federalist Society members as “squishes.”

And this week, Senate Republicans, voting along party lines, confirmed Whitney Hermandorfer, who served as director of the strategic litigation unit in the Tennessee attorney general’s office, marking the first judicial confirmation of Trump’s second term. The Times reported:

She 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. At age 38, she is part of an effort by both parties to place younger judges on the bench, where they can serve for decades given their lifetime tenure, as opposed to the previous tradition of choosing lawyers with more extensive careers. Her legal background drew criticism from Democrats.

It did, indeed. Hermandorfer, who rose to public prominence defending a Republican abortion ban and challenging a Biden administration prohibition on discrimination against transgender students, only has six years of actual legal practice — and as my MSNBC colleague Lisa Rubin recently explained, that’s “roughly half of what the American Bar Association considers necessary to be qualified for a federal judgeship.”....

But in our post-qualifications era, Trump didn’t care, and Senate Republicans, including ostensible “moderates” such as Maine’s Susan Collins, played their role and rubber-stamped Hermandorfer’s nomination.

She is the first far-right judicial confirmation of the president’s second term, but she won’t be the last.

trump is picking judges are too extreme for the Federalist Society. Six years out of law school is too soon to be a judge

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