Trump picks five new judicial nominees in Alabama, Mississippi

By Nate Raymond

Aug 12 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump without any formal announcement has decided to nominate five new judges to serve on federal trial courts in Alabama and Mississippi as he moves to install a new batch of conservative jurists in two Republican-led states.

In an unusual development, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee last week received filled-out questionnaires for six new judicial nominees, only one of whom had been previously publicly announced by the Republican president.

A spokesperson for Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican who chairs the committee, said on Tuesday it received the questionnaires on August 6 even though the Republican-led Senate has not formally received the new judicial nominations. The Senate is in recess until September.

Including the newest candidates, Trump has nominated 21 individuals to serve as life-tenured judges in his second term. He made 234 judicial appointments in his first term, helping shift the judiciary's balance to the right.

The White House had no immediate comment. The five new nominees did not respond to requests for comment.

The new picks include Edmund LaCour, Alabama's solicitor general, whom Trump sought in his first term to appoint to the bench in 2020 only to be stymied when then-Senator Doug Jones, a Democrat in Alabama, declined to return a "blue slip" backing him.

By Senate custom, blue slips must be returned by both home state senators of a district court nominee for them to advance. Trump in his final days in office in January 2021 re-nominated LaCour, though Democratic President Joe Biden withdrew that nomination a month later.

Alabama now has two Republican senators, making his path to Senate confirmation this time smoother. LaCour has a track record of supporting conservative causes in court such as gun rights and abortion restrictions.

He argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 in favor of a Republican-drawn electoral map in Alabama. The justices by a 5-4 vote concluded the redrawn districts violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Black residents.

Grassley's office said senators also received questionnaires for Harold Mooty, a partner at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings nominated to serve in Alabama's Northern District, and recently appointed Alabama Supreme Court Justice Bill Lewis, who would become a trial court judge in Alabama's Middle District.

In Mississippi, Trump selected two Republican justices on the state's supreme court to serve as trial court judges on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, James Maxwell and Robert Chamberlin, according to Grassley's office.

Maxwell in April wrote the majority opinion for the Mississippi Supreme Court holding 8-1 that a transgender teenager could not legally change his name to conform with the teen's gender identity. Chamberlin concurred.

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