There’s been chatter in MAGA circles that President Trump’s second-term judicial nominees should be ideologues willing to deliver political results, not Federalist Society types who follow the law. Mr. Trump has ignored this unproductive noise in making his first pick. Late Thursday he said he’d chosen Whitney Hermandorfer for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Ms. Hermandorfer is the director of strategic litigation for Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, who has a case at the Supreme Court this term (U.S. v. Skrmetti) defending his state’s ban on giving gender-transition hormones to minors. Mr. Skrmetti praised the nomination on Friday, saying Ms. Hermandorfer is “an absolute rock star,” “a lawyer’s lawyer,” and “perhaps the single most credentialed lawyer in America, having clerked for a full third of the justices on the Supreme Court.”
That isn’t a typo. Ms. Hermandorfer clerked for now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was on the D.C. Circuit, then Justice Samuel Alito, then Justice Amy Coney Barrett. She has also worked at Williams & Connolly, an elite Washington shop that recently made news by stepping up to represent and defend the law firm Perkins Coie from Mr. Trump’s executive order targeting its business and staff. The other important point is that her credentials are conventionally conservative, and Mr. Trump is praising Ms. Hermandorfer in those terms.
“She has a long history of working for Judges and Justices who respect the RULE OF LAW, and protect our Constitution,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Whitney is a Fighter who will inspire confidence in our Legal System.” It’s encouraging to see the President stick with this approach to selecting judges. One of the best legacies of Mr. Trump’s first term was a judiciary stocked with conservative constitutionalists.
Ms. Hermandorfer sounds like another hit from the same genre, which is a good sign for the roughly 60 other federal judicial vacancies that await Mr. Trump’s nominations.
