Is the Tenth Circuit about to get smaller? That’s what the U.S. Judicial Conference wants — in a new report, they’ve asked President Donald Trump to keep a vacancy open the next time one opens up on the Denver-based Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It’s part of an effort to combat low per-judge caseloads; similarly, they’re asking for vacancies to be kept open on the district courts in the Southern District of West Virginia, the Eastern District of Michigan, and the District of Wyoming.
But the recommendations are unlikely to be heeded. The Conference made a similar recommendation about the Tenth Circuit in the Trump I reign — and was promptly ignored. (Trump named two judges to that appellate court in his first term, and Joe Biden also made two appointments to the chronically un-busy circuit court.) In fact, Russell Wheeler, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Reuters he’s unaware of *any* president intentionally leaving a seat vacant, “I suspect the Conference is aware that these recommendations are likely to be ignored, but makes them anyway partly to present itself as a careful steward of public funds.”
This general sentiment is supercharged in the case of Donald Trump, a president who is uniquely focused on remaking the federal judiciary. During his first term in office, Trump nominated almost as many members of the federal judiciary in four years as Barack Obama did in eight, and the federal bench’s intentional shift to the right will have an impact on the future of the country for generations.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.
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