Republicans confirm Whitney Hermandorfer, the first judge of Trump's second term -- and she's a doozy

[In It to Win It]

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-judges-whitney-hermandorfer-rcna218823

Donald Trump’s first term was filled with scandals, failures and tragedies, but the president managed to complete one of his most important goals: Working with a Republican-led Senate, he successfully stacked the federal courts with young, far-right ideologues. By the time Trump left office, he’d installed 234 federal judges — including a third of the U.S. Supreme Court — which created a dynamic Americans will be forced to live with for a generation.

Looking back, however, the president and his team aren’t altogether satisfied. The problem, evidently, is that some conservative, Trump-appointed jurists — many of them handpicked by the conservative Federalist Society — are not quite radical enough.

It’s precisely why Team Trump decided that the Federalist Society simply wasn’t MAGA-aligned enough. In fact, a year before Election Day 2024, The New York Times reported that Team Trump had begun looking at Federalist Society members as “squishes.”

And this week, Senate Republicans, voting along party lines, confirmed Whitney Hermandorfer, who served as director of the strategic litigation unit in the Tennessee attorney general’s office, marking the first judicial confirmation of Trump’s second term. The Times reported:

She clerked for Justices Samuel A. Alito and Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court and for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when he sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. At age 38, she is part of an effort by both parties to place younger judges on the bench, where they can serve for decades given their lifetime tenure, as opposed to the previous tradition of choosing lawyers with more extensive careers. Her legal background drew criticism from Democrats.

It did, indeed. Hermandorfer, who rose to public prominence defending a Republican abortion ban and challenging a Biden administration prohibition on discrimination against transgender students, only has six years of actual legal practice — and as my MSNBC colleague Lisa Rubin recently explained, that’s “roughly half of what the American Bar Association considers necessary to be qualified for a federal judgeship.”

Whitney Hermandorfer just withdrew from her defense of Trump's executive order banning birthright citizenship.

Why? Because the Senate just confirmed her to be a judge on the 6th Circuit, the first judicial confirmation of Trump's second term. www.documentcloud.org/documents/25...

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) 2025-07-15T20:18:49.606Z

[WarGamer]

1. Just wait until you see the Thomas and Alito replacements next summer...

I expect LUNATICS!!!!!!!!!

[In It to Win It]

2. I think Thomas is determined to die in that seat.