Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell teed up votes to install four nominees to the powerful appellate courts. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo McConnell preps judicial confirmation frenzy The transformation of the federal judiciary has been one of the early successes of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is launching a circuit court confirmation blitz.

The top Senate Republican on Thursday teed up votes to install four nominees to the powerful appellate courts, which give the final word on the vast majority of cases that don’t reach the Supreme Court.


The nominees are Allison Eid for the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; Stephanos Bibas for the 3rd Circuit; Joan Larsen for the 6th Circuit; and Amy Coney Barrett for the 7th Circuit. Eid and Larsen are among the names Donald Trump floated during the presidential campaign last year as potential Supreme Court picks, adding more significance to their confirmations to the appellate courts.

“By confirming these nominees we can take a big step toward restoring our nation’s courts to their proper role: interpreting and applying the law based on what it actually says, not what a judge wishes it might say,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “It’s quite a departure from the last administration’s philosophy when it came to selecting judicial nominees.”

Eid and Bibas were reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier Thursday. Nominees typically have to wait a day after a committee vote before they can be considered on the floor, but Democratic senators gave consent to speed up the process in exchange for not working on a Friday, a McConnell spokesman said.

Nonetheless, Senate Democrats say the nominees are being rushed to the floor, leaving senators little time to vet the candidates.

"I think it's awful fast to move," said California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. "I think members have to read the writings, members have to take a look at their qualifications, members are leaving today. We found about it today, and it's on the floor next week."

Feinstein used a committee meeting earlier Thursday to highlight the fact that two of the court vacancies the panel moved to fill Thursday were open for Trump only because Republicans used the "blue slip" process to block President Barack Obama’s nominees for the same slots.

The committee had advanced six judicial nominees other than Eid and Bibas, as well as three U.S. attorney candidates to the Senate floor.

“Last year, the Obama administration nominated different people to these same vacancies,” Feinstein noted, referring to slots on the 3rd Circuit and the district court in South Carolina. “Those nominees didn’t get blue slips from their home state senators, so their nominations didn’t proceed. ... Not returning blue slips is the right of home-state senators.”

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Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley didn’t address the blue slip issue directly, but said Democrats should be wary about blocking female nominees in particular.

“I was disheartened by colleagues who voted against the two female nominees last week,” Grassley said. “When the Republicans voted against female circuit court nominees in 2013, Democrats called it ‘unjust.’ I won’t do that here to my friends, but I also don’t want to see a double standard for qualified female nominees from different presidents.”

While Republicans and Democrats split along party lines over four of the judicial nominees, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) singled out Bibas for unusually blunt criticism. The Senate minority whip said an article Bibas authored in 2009 promoting electric shock and other forms of corporal punishment for criminals should keep him from the bench.

“I believe what Prof. Bibas wrote ... disqualifies him from a lifetime appointment to the second-highest court in the land,” Durbin said. “This man is outside the mainstream of American legal thinking. I believe he’s outside the mainstream of conservative political thinking. Who has stepped forward on the Republican side and called for what this professor has called for?

Durbin continued: "Democrat or Republican, seriously, are we going to vote this man into this position?”

The panel ultimately split 11-9 on Bibas’ nomination, as well as Eid’s to the 10th Circuit, Liles Burke to a district court seat in Alabama, and Michael Juneau to a district court judgeship in Louisiana.

The transformation of the federal judiciary has been one of the enduring early successes of Trump’s presidency, particularly because he entered office with an unusually high number of vacancies in the district and circuit courts.

Conservative advocacy groups have been pressuring McConnell to confirm judicial nominees more quickly, although Trump already has gotten more judges installed at this point in his presidency than his predecessor.