President Donald Trump announced five judicial nominations on Tuesday, after having announced last week the first judicial nominee of his second term.
Four of the highly anticipated picks were nominated to courts in Missouri, and one was nominated to be on the Superior Court of Washington, D.C. Trump’s first nominee, Whitney Hermandorfer, was announced last week and was picked for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Trump is currently set to fill more than 40 federal court vacancies.
Joshua Divine, the former chief counsel for Senator Josh Hawley and a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was nominated to serve as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern and Western Districts of Missouri.
Zachary Bluestone, who currently serves as the violent-crimes prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in St. Louis, and whom Trump called a “True Legal Warrior,” was picked to serve as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Maria Lanahan, Missouri’s current principal deputy solicitor general, was also tapped to serve as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, as was Christian Stevens, a current judge on the Missouri Court of Appeals.
Edward Aloysius O’Connell, who served as a prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., was nominated to serve as associate judge on the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
“D.C. could, and should, be a wonderful place, if political hacks would stop making such terrible decisions,” Trump said on Truth Social. “I know Eddie will help make everyone much safer. Congratulations Eddie!”
Republican senators, including Missouri Republican Josh Hawley, have encouraged Trump to ramp up the pace of his judicial nominees in recent weeks.
“I’ve been urging them to get a move on,” Hawley, who is also member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said last week. “I’ve said to them over and over again, ‘We’ve had a lot of vacancies in Missouri for a long time now and we really need to fill them.’”
Months into his first term, Trump had already nominated now–Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch to the bench, and he had announced other key judicial nominees. Whereas Trump had made judicial nominations a priority of his first few months in office in 2017, this time, the president has been busy filling cabinet positions and ambassadorships.
“They’ve just been absolutely determined to get the cabinet done and obviously make progress with the big beautiful bill,” Texas Senator John Cornyn told the New York Times. “They’ve got a lot of litigation. And then they’ve made a priority for some of the ambassadors, which I don’t have any quibble with.”