Small Acts Of Resistance ... and sacrifice -- Digby [View all]

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/12/30/small-acts-of-resistance/

There are thousands of small acts of defiance happening throughout our country during this dark time. This is one:

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 26 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.

...

Russell Wheeler, a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's Governance Studies program and a longtime judicial nominations expert, has also been watching this trend unfold all year. He noted that the vacancy creation rate under Trump has been "way below" that of his predecessors, dating back to former President George W. Bush.

Good for them. I'm sure some of them would really like to retire.

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