enate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is widely credited with cementing a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
But McConnell’s crowning achievement may extend past the Supreme Court. Experts in FRONTLINE’s upcoming documentary McConnell, the GOP & the Court, said that McConnell sees his role in filling the federal judiciary with conservative judges as one of the strongest parts of his legacy.
When President Trump took office and McConnell served as Senate majority leader, Trump had more than 100 vacancies to fill in the lower courts, including 17 in the U.S. courts of appeals — all of them lifetime appointments. The Supreme Court hears around 80 cases a year, while the courts of appeals handle tens of thousands of cases annually — often making them the last word in most cases that impact the lives of Americans.
“[McConnell] has calculated, correctly, that most of the most contentious issues in our society eventually wind up in the courts,” conservative columnist and author Mona Charen told FRONTLINE in a 2023 interview for McConnell, the GOP & the Court. “It is critical, if you want certain outcomes, to be sure that you have the right mix of judges.”
McConnell’s Strategy During Obama’s Presidency
During the first 2020 presidential debate on Sept. 29, President Trump boasted of the “record” number of judges he had appointed, adding that one of the reasons he had the chance to appoint so many was because former President Barack Obama had left so many vacancies.
“When you leave office, you don’t leave any judges,” Trump said. “That’s like, you just don’t do that.”
It wasn’t President Obama’s decision to leave the judicial vacancies, however. Just as McConnell helped cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for decades to come, judicial experts and journalists who spoke to FRONTLINE for Supreme Revenge, a 2019 documentary examining the political battle over the highest court, credited McConnell with holding open vacancies that Trump then filled with conservative federal judges at a breakneck pace.
McConnell himself took credit for the strategy in a December 2019 interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. When Hannity wondered why President Obama left so many vacancies, McConnell said: “I’ll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”
McConnell “completely changed the nature of congressional warfare against Obama and Democratic judicial nominees,” Norman Ornstein, a political scientist at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, told FRONTLINE in 2019.
McConnell was exposed to the machinations of judicial appointments early in his career, when he worked for Marlow Cook, a U.S. senator from Kentucky who sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. During his time as a staffer for Cook, McConnell saw two of President Richard Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees rejected.
“It was in those years that McConnell really came to understand the importance, the centrality of judicial nominations in our political system, both the Supreme Court nominations and also … federal lower-court nominations,” Alec MacGillis, a ProPublica reporter and author of “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” told FRONTLINE in 2019.
The young McConnell also learned “what it takes to get these nominations through the Senate, to really kind of figure out how to win that game, the game of judicial politics,” MacGillis said.
Those lessons proved useful when McConnell took on leadership positions in the Senate. Senate Republicans were in the minority for much of Obama’s tenure, but under McConnell’s leadership they employed filibusters to slow down or block the confirmation of judicial nominees — a tactic Democrats had used under President George W. Bush. GOP senators also withheld “blue slips,” which were traditionally given to the two senators from the home state of a judicial nominee for their approval or rejection.
In order to overcome those efforts to stall appointments, in November 2013 then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats changed the rules, eliminating filibusters for federal judicial and executive branch nominees, with the exception of Supreme Court nominees.
At the time, McConnell told the Democrats, “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.” When Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015, confirmations of Obama’s judicial nominees slowed to a crawl.
According to the Congressional Research Service, only 28.6 percent of Obama’s judicial nominees were confirmed during the last two years of his presidency, the lowest percentage of confirmations from 1977 to 2022, the years the report covered.
Trump’s Judicial Appointments, With McConnell’s Help
When Trump won the 2016 election, Senate Majority Leader McConnell employed the “nuclear option” when Senate Republicans ended filibusters for Supreme Court nominees — stymieing attempts from Democrats to block Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.
Thirty of President Trump’s appeals court nominees were confirmed during his first two years of office. According to CRS, that was the greatest number of appeals court nominees confirmed by the Senate in the first two years of any presidency since it started tracking that data.
President Trump maintained his pace through the last two years of his term and appointed 54 appeals court judges during his 4-year tenure — a higher number than any other recent president, with the exception of President Jimmy Carter. (By comparison, President Obama appointed 55 appeals court judges over the course of eight years.)
By the end of his term, Trump confirmed a total of 228 judges across the appeals and district courts. They were mostly young, white and male. They would go on to decide cases about elections, voting rights, immigration, the environment, labor, abortion, gun control and other issues that impact the lives of Americans. They will remain on the courts for their lifetimes.