The Trump judges
By 
On the Supreme Court, the two most consistent Trump lackeys were actually nominated by one of the Georges Bush, as was the justice who wrote the worst opinion aggrandizing his power. It’s tempting to conclude from this thay there’s no difference between Trump nominees and those of any other Republican. At the circuit court level, however, Trump judges are worse [gift link]:
President Trump has found a powerful but obscure bulwark in the appeals court judges he appointed during his first term. They have voted overwhelmingly in his favor when his administration’s actions have been challenged in court in his current term, a New York Times analysis of their 2025 records shows.
Time and again, appellate judges chosen by Mr. Trump in his first term reversed rulings made by district court judges in his second, clearing the way for his policies and gradually eroding a perception early last year that the legal system was thwarting his efforts to amass presidential power.
When Mr. Trump criticized a ruling from a so-called “Obama judge” in 2018, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. responded that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”
But the data suggests that in the 13 appellate courts, there is increasingly such a thing as a Trump judge. The president’s appointees voted to allow his policies to take effect 133 times and voted against them only 12 times. Ninety-two percent of their total votes were in favor of the administration. That figure far outstrips support for Mr. Trump’s agenda from appeals court judges appointed by other Republican presidents, and from Mr. Trump’s appointees to the district courts.
[…]
Experts who have studied the voting patterns of federal judges have found that, even before Mr. Trump, their rulings had some degree of alignment with the partisan positions of the president who appointed them. On the Supreme Court, for instance, where the behavior has been closely studied, justices have shown a decades-long tilt toward their appointing president, a 2016 study found.
The correlation between ideology and voting among judges in the Times analysis extended beyond those appointed by Mr. Trump. Appellate judges appointed by Democratic presidents voted against Mr. Trump’s agenda 73 percent of the time, compared to 32 percent of the time by appellate judges appointed by Republicans.
But the impact of Mr. Trump’s appeals judges on his own agenda has been hard to overstate, given the glut of litigation over the president’s expansive executive actions and the pushback they have encountered from district court judges.
Whichever level of the federal judiciary one wishes to focus on, the necessity of Democrats running the most competitive race they can in every remotely contestable Senate election cannot be overstated. The House isn’t enough because it can’t stop the federal judiciary from getting steadily more MAGA.