By Nate Raymond and Jack Queen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump secured approval of his first judicial nominee of his second term, as the U.S. Senate confirmed a former law clerk to three members of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority to a seat on a federal appeals court.
The Republican-led Senate voted 46-42 along party lines in favor of Whitney Hermandorfer, a lawyer serving under Tennessee’s attorney general, to be appointed as a life-tenured judge on the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
She is the first of 15 judicial nominees the president has announced to date to secure Senate approval, as Trump and his Republican allies in the Senate look to add to the 234 judicial appointments Trump made in his first term.
With Hermandorfer’s confirmation, Trump tied former President Joe Biden’s total of 235 judicial appointments.
Such appointments could help Trump further shift the ideological balance of the judiciary to the right at a moment when White House officials have accused judges who have blocked parts of his immigration and cost-cutting agenda they have found to be unlawful of being part of a “judicial coup.”
Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune, ahead of a procedural vote on Hermandorfer’s nomination on Thursday, said the goal was to fill around 50 judicial vacancies on the bench with judges who “understand the proper role of a judge.”
He said judges should “understand that their job is to interpret the law, not usurp the job of the people’s elected representatives by legislating from the bench.”
Hermandorfer clerked for Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett, and clerked for Justice Brett Kavanaugh while he was a judge on a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. Barrett and Kavanaugh were appointed to the Supreme Court in Trump’s first term, giving it a 6-3 conservative majority.
Hermandorfer has been leading a strategic litigation unit in Republican Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s office, where she defended the state’s near-total abortion ban and challenged a rule adopted under Biden barring discrimination against transgender students.
Senate Democrats had argued that Hermandorfer, 38, who is just a decade out of law school, lacked sufficient legal experience to join the bench and had shown a willingness to support extreme legal positions supporting Trump’s agenda.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe in Washington and Nate Raymond in Boston; Additional reporting by Jack Queen in New York; Editing by Jamie Freed)
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