DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—President Donald Trump’s second-term judicial nominees share similar qualities with his first-term picks, though a limited number of vacancies mean his impact remains an open question. Trump began this term with just 40 vacancies to fill, less than half of the open seats as he inherited starting in his first term. Confirming 234 judges to the federal bench, including three Supreme Court justices, is often considered by conservatives to be Trump’s greatest first-term accomplishment. Now with 49 open seats, Trump has named 15 nominees and confirmed five, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Judicial Appointments Tracker. Confirmation hearings have been held for all but one nominee. “I really do not see much difference between the caliber of nominees in Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0,” South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The story of Trump’s second term is a “lack of judgeships” to fill, Michael A. Fragoso, who was the Senate Judiciary Committee’s chief counsel for nominations during Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation in 2020, wrote in an Aug. 20 piece for Public Discourse. “There has never been a Senate that’s better positioned to confirm conservative judges, but not since the first Bush administration have there been so few seats to fill,” Fragoso wrote. ‘Political Edge’ Trump unloaded on Federalist Society founder Leonard Leo in May, calling him a “sleazebag” who “in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions” in a Truth Social post. Despite his split with the organization that was so influential in shaping his first-term picks, Trump’s latest nominees share similar qualities on paper with those he selected during his first term, though they may have more political experience and “boldness.” Robert Luther III, a former White House lawyer who worked on judicial nominations during Trump’s first term, said he doesn’t see a significant difference in quality or background of the latest nominees. Trump’s recent “very young, very conservative” district court picks could have easily been recommended for nomination if they had come around before, he said. “A lot of people have been asking how the judges are different, I would say, you ought to look to the Senate to see how the senators are different,” he told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Republican Sens. Ashley Moody of Florida and Eric Schmitt of Missouri have allowed for an “even younger, more aggressive wave of judges” from their states, he said. Joshua Divine, who was confirmed as a federal district judge for the Eastern District of Missouri in July, previously served as the state’s solicitor general, where he worked on a major case challenging the Joe Biden administration’s pressuring of platforms to censor speech online. “President Trump continues to select highly qualified judicial nominees who will uphold the rule of law and closely follow the Constitution,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Four other nominees were confirmed before Congress’ August recess: Emil Bove to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and Whitney Downs Hermandorfer to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, along with Zachary Bluestone and Cristian Stevens to judgeships in the Eastern District of Missouri. The “current crop of Trump judges looks an awful lot like the last batch on paper, if in possession of a more political edge,” Fragoso wrote for Public Discourse. “The real difference is that staggeringly, all of Trump’s picks have experience in what could be called Republican politics,” he wrote. “Whether it’s campaign work, committee service, state or federal political appointments, or even elected office, they have all spent time in the political fight.” Luther cautioned against drawing conclusions too soon with such a small sample size, noting it’s easy to “over analyze” how much one person might be different or the same when there are fewer nominees to compare. Blue Slip Battles Trump has expressed frustration with the pace of confirmations, calling on Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley for maintaining blue slips, which allow home state senators to block candidates. “I have a Constitutional Right to appoint Judges and U.S. Attorneys, but that RIGHT has been completely taken away from me in States that have just one Democrat United States Senator,” he wrote Aug. 24 on Truth Social. “Therefore, the only candidates that I can get confirmed for these most important positions are, believe it or not, Democrats! Chuck Grassley should allow strong Republican candidates to ascend to these very vital and powerful roles, and tell the Democrats, as they often tell us, to go to HELL!” Grassley pointed out that any judge or U.S. attorney without a blue slip doesn’t have the votes to get confirmed or move out of committee. “As chairman I set Pres Trump noms up for SUCCESS NOT FAILURE,” he wrote Aug. 25 on X. Blue slips also allowed Republicans to keep 30 liberals off the bench during the Biden administration, Grassley wrote. “I think if the blue slip was abolished, that may make it easier for Trump to confirm conservative district court nominees in blue states, but if the tables were turned, Democratic Presidents could confirm far-left district court nominees in red states,” Blackman told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I understand why Senators want to keep this prerogative.” Luther doesn’t fault Grassley for not doing away with blue slips, which he believes “disproportionately hurt Republican presidents,” because there aren’t enough votes. Some of the seats Trump inherited at the start of his term, including four North Carolina picks he announced nominees for Aug. 22, were open because Republican senators blocked Biden from filling them. Republican North Carolina Sens. Thom Tillis and Ted Budd kept the seats open by declining to approve a Biden pick. Tillis announced his retirement in July after Trump attacked him for opposing the “big, beautiful bill.” “President Trump is fulfilling his promise to the American people by putting forward bold and fearless judicial nominees,” Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project, said in a statement after Trump announced the North Carolina nominees. “These four outstanding individuals demonstrate his strong commitment to upholding the rule of law and moving away from the era of radical judicial activism that has infected our courts.” With fewer seats in play, some are calling on more judges to retire. “I would encourage any conservative appellate judge who is eligible to retire or take senior status to do so because there are very impressive, hard-working people in the White House Counsel’s office that will ensure that a strong conservative judge succeeds them,” Luther said. Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Mitchell Goldberg, a George. W. Bush appointee, most recently confirmed his retirement on Tuesday, opening up a seat when he leaves on Sept. 19. U.S. District Judge David Godbey, a George W. Bush appointee in the Northern District of Texas, also notified the court Aug. 20 that he intends to take senior status in September, opening up another seat. Pointing to Trump’s decision to nominate Bove, who was formerly his personal defense attorney and a high-level Department of Justice official during the first months of the administration, former federal prosecutor Brendan Ballou suggested in a recent Atlantic article that judges may delay retirement out of concern for who Trump will name in their place. “Whether the White House wants to acknowledge it or not, the caliber of its early judicial nominations will affect the number of vacancies it gets to fill,” William & Mary Law School professor Jonathan Adler similarly wrote on X in May. “This is why the Bove nomination was a risky pick (even apart from the merits).” Luther said it’s most likely that some judges just don’t want to retire. “The majority of the Republican appointees who are eligible to retire were also eligible to retire during Trump’s first term,” he told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Blackman wrote in June that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito likely “would not want someone like the three Trump appointees to replace them.” “They would want someone who votes like them,” he wrote. “Bove would likely fill the mold.” Originally published by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The post Here’s How Trump’s Judicial Nominees Are Stacking Up So Far appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On Friday’s Amanpour on CNN International (but interestingly did not air on PBS), substitute host Bianna Golodryga opened with one of the show’s kookiest anti-Trump guests yet (and there's been some stiff competition there), “Doomsday Scenario” newsletter author and Howard Dean for President webmasters Garrett Graff. In 2019, he wrote that Fox News was a threat to national security and recently compared ICE to Hitler’s Gestapo, so he has a history to live up to. Graff certainly brought in the accusations of "fascism" and “authoritarianism” linked to Trump’s takeover of the Smithsonian, ICE raids, and the National Guard patrolling D.C. This time, he used the release of his new book on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to sound off on Trump, saying the "American Reich" is upon us. Even Golodryga’s introduction was packed with barely suppressed liberal hysteria. [A]rmed troops on the streets of Washington, D.C., and threats from the U.S. president that more cities will soon follow. President Trump is ramping up his anti-crime agenda with immigration raids...And Trump's critics are increasingly in the firing line, as the administration seeks to bend the U.S. legal system to its will. There's also a grinding assault on America's cultural institutions...It's a weight of evidence that has many asking, is the world's leading democracy losing the fight to protect its founding democratic values? My next guest says that the answer is clear and that the United States has already slipped into fascism. She then fawned over Graff's warning as "quite chilling to hear these words from you," someone whom she hilariously claimed is "not known for hyperbole and faux outrage, so the fact that you are sounding the alarm now and the fact that you have said that this has been a pivotal week in what you've concluded has been the U.S. term to fascism really speaks volumes."     "What specifically about this current environment in this week that we're in has led you to that conclusion," she asked. Check out Graff's answer and tell us he's not in the business of ginning up hyperbole and phony outrage: "[H]ere we are, you know, seven or so months into the Trump administration, we see the military, you know, seizing and holding our nation's capital....You know, this is what fascism would look like in America and I think the sooner that we recognize what this moment now represents in our country, the better we can confront it and act on it." Graff described ICE's tactics as "kidnapping and grabbing people off the streets, sometimes to deport them overseas, to countries that they have no connection to. I mean, that is as textbook an example of how fascism operated in the 20th century in Germany or the Soviet Union as you could possibly imagine…." False parallels abound: Germany and the Soviet Union didn’t so much deport their opponents as put them in prison or liquidate them. And critics of Trump’s so-called fascist dictatorship like Graff feel pretty free to criticize the dictator. Wouldn’t they be afraid to speak up if they truly believed their own rhetoric? Graff offensively compared D.C.’s female mayor Muriel Bowser to an abused wife (with Trump the abusive husband) for daring to say a few non-hostile things about Trump’s federal intervention. Golodryga quoted a recent Graff article back to him that dredged up a Hitler parallel. [T]his line really stood out to me. You said, “Do we end up merely like Hungary, "merely," in quotes, or do we go all the way toward an ‘American Reich’? So, far after years of studying World War II, I fear that America's trajectory feels more like Berlin circa 1933 than it does Budapest circa 2015.” That is very chilling, Garrett, to hear those words from you and to read them…. Except the Trump administration is the one defending Jews from anti-Semitic attacks, to the disdain of the anti-Israel left.

Standing just 1 foot, 9.5 inches tall, Chandra Bahadur Dangi was the shortest man to ever live. After he was honored by Guinness World Records in 2012, the Nepalese farmer fulfilled his lifelong dream of traveling the globe. The post The Life Of Chandra Bahadur Dangi, The Shortest Person In Recorded History appeared first on All That's Interesting.

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