With ruthless efficiency and speed, and with little consideration of Democratic objections, Trump has managed to largely blunt and even reverse his predecessors’ efforts to diversify the federal judiciary by appointing dozens of white men to the bench.
WASHINGTON — A couple of weeks after the 116th Congress opened in January 2019, President Trump announced his first slate of judicial nominees for that congressional session. That slate was notable mostly for what it lacked: any hint of diversity. All six nominees were men, and all six men were white.
Detractors have noticed too, worried both by what Trump’s judges believe and what signal a cohort of white males ascending to the federal bench sends to society. They charge that a lack of representation for judges of color and for women could result in a loss of faith in the courts by those communities, in particular on contentious issues like policing, affirmative action and reproductive choice.
Both of Trump’s confirmed Supreme Court justices are middle-aged white men. The first of those — who was also the first Trump nominee to any court — was Neil Gorsuch, nominated by Trump almost exactly three years ago. It’s unclear how many more appointments President Trump, who is in the final year of his term, will get to make. By an informal agreement known as the Thurmond Rule, a president usually does not nominate new judges in the last six months or so of his term, unless there is bipartisan consensus for their confirmation. But Trump and his Republican allies have shown no hesitancy in breaking with precedent.
None of that, however, is anything close to a guarantee that judicial appointments will cease or even slow, though they might have in ordinary times and under the same conditions. Trump’s picks are in keeping with the demographics of the legal profession. About 85 percent of attorneys are white, according to the American Bar Association, and about 62 percent of attorneys are men, according to the Census Bureau. But the work judges do reverberates across all of society and, in that respect, Trump’s picks do not mirror the face of a nation that will soon no longer be majority-white.
The notion of judicial diversity as a valuable asset was probably most famously expressed by Obama nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who in a speech given eight years before her nomination said that a “wise Latina woman” judge would “more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.” Conservatives used the “wise Latina” comment to suggest Sotomayor thought white judges were inferior.
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