A rising faction within the conservative legal movement is laying the groundwork for Donald Trump to appoint judges who prioritize loyalty to him and aggressively advocate for dismantling the federal government should he win a second term.
The movement’s old guard, including lawyers who helped found the Federalist Society in the 1980s, is pushing back, fearful of discrediting the conservative principles they worked for decades to legitimize within a legal profession that leaned left.
Since losing the 2020 election, Trump has broken with Federalist Society leaders who had eagerly boosted his blitz of judicial appointments during his first term but later balked at his efforts to thwart President Biden’s victory and didn’t openly support him as he faced dozens of criminal charges.
Trump has gravitated to more-combative lawyers outside the conservative legal establishment who have said they want to hobble regulatory agencies and concentrate power in the White House. The shift has sidelined the old guard in favor of groups like America First Legal, run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who isn’t a lawyer but said he set up the group to fight what it called “an unholy alliance of corrupt special interests, big tech titans, the fake news media and liberal Washington politicians.”
This ascendant faction wants more judges like U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the controversial Trump-appointed Florida jurist who dismissed one of the criminal cases against Trump, and fewer like U.S. appeals court Judge Stephanos Bibas of the Third Circuit, another Trump appointee, who in 2020 rejected the former president’s bid to overturn his election loss that year.
Future Trump judicial nominees must be “even more bold and more conservative and more fearless,” than those appointed in the first administration, said Republican legal activist Mike Davis, one of the conservative lawyers pushing for a harder line in a potential second Trump administration.
Trump has spoken admiringly of Davis as “tough as hell.”
“We want him in a very high capacity,” the former president said at a recent rally. …
Some of the divisions within the movement are more of style than substance, and both the traditionalists and upstarts are likely to be represented in a future Trump administration.
“They are all in the same church, even if they sometimes sit at different pews,” said Leonard Leo, the longtime Federalist Society leader who advised Trump on judicial nominations during his first term.
Moreover, Trump’s ability to appoint judges will depend on control of the Senate; even if Republicans capture a narrow majority, some relative moderates such as Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) and Susan Collins (R., Maine) could balk at confirming the most hard-line nominees….