Whitney Hermandorfer: Trump's First Judicial Nomination Is a Gift to MAGA Loyalists - JP Collins @ Balls and Strikes

[In It to Win It]

Balls and Strikes

Nominees

Although behind the pace of his first term—by this time in 2017, Trump had already appointed a Supreme Court justice and had a circuit court judge in the confirmation pipeline—on May 1, Trump finally announced the first nominee of his second term (albeit in a bizarre late-night Truth Social rant): Whitney Downs Hermandorfer of Tennessee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She would replace Judge Jane Branstetter Stranch, an Obama nominee who announced her conditional retirement in January 2024. (As I previously noted, Stranch would be well within her rights to withdraw her retirement and remain in active service, but hasn’t given any indication that she plans to do so.)

At first blush, Hermandorfer looks very much like the typical nominee from Trump’s first term. She is young (37), white, and impeccably credentialed. She’s been a frequent participant at Federalist Society events, and clerked for Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court, and for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit. You couldn’t grow someone in a lab with deeper ties to the conservative legal establishment if you tried (and that won’t stop the Federalist Society from trying, I’m sure). Leonard Leo would surely approve.

Except Leo and the Federalist Society aren’t making the judicial picks anymore. That honor has fallen to the likes of Mike Davis, a former nominations counsel to Senator Chuck Grassley who now leads a conservative legal activist group when he isn’t tweeting about putting kids in cages. In a recent Fox News screed, Davis made clear that Trump has promised to go “beyond the garden-variety Federalist Society choices” for judicial nominees and instead find “even more bold and fearless” (read: loyal) candidates to do his bidding.

And if you look beyond Hermandorfer’s establishment credentials, I think you’ll find this is one of the few promises Trump is poised to keep. Hermandorfer’s current role is Director of the Strategic Litigation Unit in the Office of the Tennessee Attorney General. From what I can gather, the current strategy seems to be “support Donald Trump at all costs.” For example, Hermandorder’s office supported Trump’s racist, anti-constitutional executive order to ignore the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause for children born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents, notwithstanding 150-plus years of settled understanding to the contrary. She’s also a willing participant in Trump’s attacks on independent agencies: As she told the Supreme Court in a recent amicus brief, it’s agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, not unchecked executive power, that really present “an especially grave danger to the States and their citizens.”

To simplify: blatantly unconstitutional executive orders? Fine. Good, even. An agency meant to protect workers from unfair labor practices? Tyranny!

Trump's first judicial nominee has basically made her career on thinly veiled transphobia ballsandstrikes.org/nominations/...

— Balls & Strikes (@ballsandstrikes.org) 2025-05-08T16:51:05.050Z

[LetMyPeopleVote]

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

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 “unapologetically combative, MAGA-friendly” 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