McGahn’s Bid To Stack The Courts With Conservative Judges Was A Great Success

This morning, via Twitter, Trump surprised White House counsel Don McGahn by announcing that he would be leaving his position “in the fall, shortly after the confirmation (hopefully) of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.”

But although the Russia probe is unfinished — it appears in fact to be heating up — McGahn has been quite successful in another area of his work: stacking the courts with conservative judges. Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur recently put together a full tally: The White House has successfully ushered 60 judges through the Senate, “including 33 district court judges, 26 appeals court judges and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.” Eight more are expected to be confirmed next week, when hearings on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will also begin.

These judges, most of whom are relatively young and many of whom are outwardly ideological, will change U.S. law for decades. The situation is the product of a Faustian bargain conservatives, and especially Evangelicals, struck: They would tolerate and even celebrate Trump if he delivered the courts to them.

It’s a project on which McGahn, who proved his conservative bona fides as a George W. Bush nominee to the Federal Election Commission, worked closely with the Federalist Society and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. But in a speech last November highlighted by a recent New York Times magazine story, McGahn made clear that he was the man who brought the nominees to Trump, exercising what the Times described as “an unprecedented degree of control over judicial appointments.”

And it’s no accident that the administration is pushing some wild characters through. In that November speech, McGahn told a story of how he had compiled a list of more moderate conservative justices, and another made up of “some folks that are kind of too hot for prime time, the kind that would be really hot in the Senate, probably people who have written a lot, we really get a sense of their views — the kind of people that make some people nervous.”

Trump, McGahn said, threw the first list in the trash and sought confirmation for the judges on the second.

So as McGahn prepares to head for the exit, leaving behind a White House that has existed in a state of perpetual chaos for eighteen months, he can rest assured that in one aspect, his job was a phenomenal success. He was, arguably, one of the most successful members of the administration. Around the time McGahn is leaving this fall, there’s a chance a blue wave could deliver the Senate into Democratic hands, putting a stop the conservatives’ judicial onslaught. But the judges already in place will be with us for decades.