The Senate has voted to confirm the first judicial nominee of Donald Trump’s second term, marking the resumption of the president’s longstanding campaign to install a conservative tilt across the federal judiciary.
Whitney Hermandorfer was confirmed in a 46-42 vote along party lines to replace an Obama-era appointee on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals — pushing the court which hears appeals from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee further to the right.
Trump has long indicated he expects a level of enduring loyalty from his picks to the federal bench, calling them “my judges.” But the Senate vote also follows an aggressive campaign from Trump allies to target existing judges whose rulings have created obstacles to the administration’s agenda, culminating in calls for their impeachment.
The House never pursued those impeachment resolutions. And efforts to hamstring the power of district court judges — including by limiting their ability to issue injunctions with sweeping, nationwide implications — have also proved fruitless, after the provisions were stripped from Trump’s landmark domestic policy bill signed into law earlier this month.
In Trump’s first term, the vast transformation of the federal judiciary was a marquee accomplishment. He nominated hundreds of judges to the federal bench, buoyed by changes to Senate rules that facilitated their swift confirmation. Now, relatively few seats remain for Trump to fill, after former President Joe Biden also nominated and succeeded in seating hundreds of judges. Official U.S. courts data show roughly 49 existing vacancies.
A graduate of Princeton University and George Washington University Law School, Hermandorfer clerked for Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett and then-D.C. Circuit judge Brett Kavanaugh. She has served as director of the Strategic Litigation Unit of the Tennessee Attorney General’s office and defended the state’s near-total abortion ban along with its prohibition on gender-affirming care for minors.
In his announcement of her nomination, Trump called Hermandorfer “a staunch defender of Girls’ and Women’s Sports.”
Democrats and their allies argued that Hermandorfer, who graduated law school in 2015, lacked the professional experience to hold a lifetime appointment on the powerful appeals court and criticized her work on the frontlines of conservative culture wars. Democratic Senators voted in unison to reject her nomination.
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