Earlier this week, the White House announced a new slate of federal court nominees, a list which included PLF’s own Damien Schiff. In the Daily Caller, I explain that the President’s list of appointees reflects a President who intends to appoint justices to the lower courts who fit the Scalia mold. No legerdemain here; these appointments demonstrate the President intends to make big league appointments to our federal courts. Or as I write in the op-ed:
Many Americans voted for Donald Trump because they believed him when he promised to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court of the United States similar in philosophy to the late Justice Antonin Scalia. That bet paid off bigly when President Trump appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Court.
Yet Trump, through his recent identification of additional judges he intends to nominate for the lower federal courts,has signaled he will deliver even greater returns to the voters who pulled the lever for him. By recently announcing a slate of experienced and highly qualified individuals for appointments to the lower federal courts, President Trump has shown he intends to remake the federal judiciary by appointing judges who respect the rule of law and understand their role under our Constitution’s separation of powers.
Obviously the nine justices of the Supreme Court have the final say on what the law is, to paraphrase first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. But judges of the lower courts also address disputed questions of fact and law each and every day, questions the High Court may not answer for years—if ever. These questions impact where our children go to school, what conditions we face at work, what burdensome regulations the government may or may not impose on a business, and more. Therefore, the judges on those lower courts should have the same respect for the law that Trump promised his Supreme Court nominees would possess.
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The President promised to replace Justice Scalia with someone who saw the law in much the same way that Scalia did. But with this latest list of nominees, he has shown that he will give the country a judiciary full of Scalia’s. If he does nothing else, those who voted for him owe him a debt of gratitude for the respect for the rule of law that these appointments reflect.
Read the whole thing.