Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has come under fire in recent days amid the coronavirus outbreak, as the Kentucky lawmaker sent Senators home for a long weekend rather than work to pass the coronavirus relief package being negotiated between the House and White House. But while McConnell may have been willing to take a more relaxed approach to the global pandemic that's shuttering cities across the U.S. and putting millions of Americans at risk, the Senate Majority Leader is still being proactive when it comes to one thing: keeping the judiciary system as conservative as possible. McConnell has made confirming federal judges his number one priority during Donald Trump’s presidency, confirming nearly 200 federal judges as of February. And with the number of vacant spots dwindling, McConnell is now taking a new approach to ensuring Trump’s potential Democratic successor won’t have much room to appoint judges of their own.

The New York Times reports that the Senate Majority Leader has started to personally reach out to federal judges appointed by past Republican presidents to pressure their retirement while Trump is still in office. McConnell has been contacting judges to “sound them out on their plans and assure them that they would have a worthy successor if they gave up their seats soon,” the Times reports, aided by other Republicans who are making similar overtures of their own. Republicans are reminding the federal judges that retiring now would be “advantageous,” the Times notes, given that a Democratic win in 2020 could see the end of conservative judicial appointments until 2029. “We have to hope for the best and plan for the worst,” Mike Davis, a former nomination counsel for Senate Republicans and creator of the conservative judicial advocacy group the Article III Project, told the Times.

While it's currently unclear how many judges McConnell and other Republicans have personally reached out to, their campaign could affect more than 90 judges who have been appointed by past Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Those judges are all eligible to receive “senior status” this year, a form of semi-retirement that allows their successor to be appointed even as they continue to hear cases. The 90 judges come on top of the already significant progress Trump and McConnell have made in reshaping the judiciary since Trump's inauguration, with the president currently projected to have appointed a full quarter of federal judges by the end of the year.

The report of McConnell's push to get more Republican judges in the judiciary ironically comes just a few days after the Senate Majority Leader himself stressed the need for an “independent” judiciary free from partisan interests. At an oath ceremony for U.S. District Judge Justin Walker Friday in Kentucky—which McConnell attended with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh Friday while other lawmakers negotiated the coronavirus relief package—the Senator took aim at recent comments made by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, which targeted Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch for their likely objection to abortion rights. “Just last week, my colleague, the Senate Democratic leader showed an unfortunate spotlight once again on the threat that partisanship poses to our independent judiciary,” McConnell said at the ceremony Friday. “That's why judges like Justin are absolutely essential.” McConnell's Democratic critics, however, noted how the Senate Majority Leader's new pressure campaign is itself being undertaken with a clearly partisan intent. “Senator McConnell knows he can’t achieve any of his extreme goals legislatively, so he continues to attempt to pull America to the far right by packing the courts,” Schumer said in a statement responding to the Times report, while Brian Fallon, executive director of the progressive judicial group Demand Justice, told the Times McConnell's “hand-in-glove coordination shows how utterly politicized the judicial branch is.”