ON ALMOST ANY measure, Donald Trump ranks himself among the most successful presidents in history. In one area—making appointments to America’s federal court system—he may actually be right. In a little over three years, Mr Trump has nominated and won Senate confirmation for 192 federal judges, including 137 district-court judges, 51 appellate judges and two Supreme Court justices. No president since at least Ronald Reagan has racked up judicial appointments so quickly (the closest was Bill Clinton with 189 at this point in his presidency: see chart). By the end of the year, on current trends, a quarter of federal judges will be Mr Trump’s appointees. They may prove his most enduring legacy.

Mitch McConnell deserves much of the credit. The Senate majority leader has made confirming the president’s judicial nominees his “top priority” (his motto: “leave no vacancy behind”). He has not let Senate norms and institutions get in his way. To speed up the process, Republicans have scheduled confirmation hearings during Senate recesses, and packed several hearings into a single day, over objections from their Democratic colleagues. They have also done away with the “blue slip” policy, a century-old tradition giving senators the power to block judicial nominees from their home states. Mr McConnell was not always in such a hurry. In 2016 his delaying tactics denied then-President Barack Obama a chance to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. They ultimately paid off when Mr Trump won the presidency and appointed Neil Gorsuch to the seat.

How much Mr Trump’s appointments will reshape American jurisprudence remains to be seen. On the one hand, his nominees have been more conservative than those of previous Republican presidents. Many are members of the Federalist Society, a network of right-wing lawyers. Nearly all hold conservative views on hot-button social issues such as abortion. They are young, too, so they can expect to serve longer terms. In March 2019 Mr Trump appointed Allison Jones Rushing, a partner at Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC, to the bench at the age of 37, making her the youngest federal judge in more than 15 years. By the White House’s reckoning, the average age of the president’s circuit-court nominees is under 50—ten years younger than those appointed by his immediate predecessor.

On the other hand, tipping the ideological balance of the courts takes time. And not all of Mr Trump's picks have made a difference. Many have filled slots previously occupied by Republican-appointed judges, or Democrat-appointed judges on courts tilted heavily to the right or left. This is unlikely to change in the coming months as liberal judges, reluctant to add another judicial feather to Mr Trump’s cap, delay stepping down. This will not stop the president from boasting about his tally. “We are going to be just about number one by the time we finish,” he said in November about his judicial appointments. “Number one of any president, any administration.”