Trump picks five new judicial nominees in Alabama, Mississippi

By Nate Raymond

Aug 12 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was nominating 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.

The Republican president announced the nominees on his social media platform a week after the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee quietly received filled-out questionnaires for all of the five new judicial nominees.

A spokesperson for Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican who chairs the committee, said on Tuesday it received the questionnaires on August 6. The Republican-led 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 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 is highly intelligent, talented, and will strongly protect the Constitution," Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.

LaCour argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 in favor of a Republican-drawn electoral map in Alabama. The justices by a 5-4 vote in 2023 concluded the redrawn districts violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Black residents.

Trump said he also is nominating Harold Mooty, a partner at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings who would 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.

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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