Trump Reshaping Courts at Fastest Pace in Five Decades – “Republican lawyers and lawmakers are working together to install conservative judges on the influential federal appeals courts at a clip not seen in decades…In the weeks before Donald J. Trump took office, lawyers joining his administration gathered at a law firm near the Capitol, where Donald F. McGahn II, the soon-to-be White House counsel, filled a white board with a secret battle plan to fill the federal appeals courts with young and deeply conservative judges. Mr. McGahn, instructed by Mr. Trump to maximize the opportunity to reshape the judiciary, mapped out potential nominees and a strategy, according to two people familiar with the effort: Start by filling vacancies on appeals courts with multiple openings and where Democratic senators up for re-election next year in states won by Mr. Trump — like Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania — could be pressured not to block his nominees. And to speed them through confirmation, avoid clogging the Senate with too many nominees for the district courts, where legal philosophy is less crucial. Nearly a year later, that plan is coming to fruition. Mr. Trump has already appointed eight appellate judges, the most this early in a presidency since Richard M. Nixon, and on Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to send a ninth appellate nominee — Mr. Trump’s deputy White House counsel, Gregory Katsas — to the floor Republicans are systematically filling appellate seats they held open during President Barack Obama’s final two years in office with a particularly conservative group of judges with life tenure. Democrats — who in late 2013 abolished the ability of 41 lawmakers to block such nominees with a filibuster, then quickly lost control of the Senate — have scant power to stop them. “We will set records in terms of the number of judges,” Mr. Trump said at the White House recently, adding that many more nominees were in the pipeline. Mr. Trump started with 21 open appellate seats because after Republicans gained control of the Senate in 2015, they essentially shut down the confirmation process….Almost Half of Appeals Judges Are Eligible for Senior Status State of the federal appeals courts at the start of each president’s first term. Liberals have accused Mr. Trump of outsourcing his nominations process to the Federalist Society. Mr. Trump has also had help from the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, in lowering impediments and keeping the confirmation assembly line moving.”

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