WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s days of trying to MAGA-fy the courts are over.

With Democrats set to take control of the Senate in January, Trump will no longer be able to count on Republicans to simply rubber-stamp his nominees to lifetime federal judgeships.

GOP senators have been doing this for the last two years, confirming dozens of court picks who arguably should have been disqualified from the start: all have refused to say during their Senate nomination hearings, under oath, that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election or that he incited the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

It takes 51 votes in the Senate to confirm a judicial nominee, assuming all 100 senators are present. If they’re not, it takes a simple majority. Democrats will hold at least 54 seats in January as a result of Tuesday’s elections, and possibly 56, if two elections still being tallied in Alaska and Mississippi go their way.

That means for the rest of his presidency, Trump will have to work with Democrats to get his judicial nominees through, or risk getting none confirmed at all. Some Democrats may not be willing to support his court picks anyway, particularly those eyeing a 2028 presidential run.

He’ll also need Democratic sign-off on any potential Supreme Court nominees over the next two years, should any of the court’s elderly justices retire or die. Trump has already appointed three Supreme Court justices between his two terms in office.

Josh Orton, president of the progressive judicial advocacy group Demand Justice, said it is “essential” that Democrats recognize the “blaring mandate” voters sent them: They’re done with Trump’s corruption, and that extends to the federal courts.

Democrats need to stop engaging in “backroom, faux bipartisan insider horse-trading” with judicial nominees, he said, referring to senators like Peter Welch of Vermont and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania who have voted for some of Trump’s court picks. Demand Justice routinely calls out Democrats who help to advance any of this president’s judicial nominees.

“He has been appointing people who lie and won’t say he lost the 2020 election,” Orton told HuffPost. “You would have to be completely delusional to see last night’s results and believe there is a mandate for bipartisan cooperation on election-denying corporatists for the federal bench.”

You’re gonna have to start working with Democrats, sir.

via Associated Press

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who will likely be elected majority leader come January, signaled Wednesday that Democrats will expect the White House to put forward a different calibre of court picks if Trump wants any confirmed.

“Look, we want judicial nominees like we showed in ’23 and ’24, who obey the law, who have fidelity to the law,” Schumer told reporters, referring to former President Joe Biden’s court picks. “Too many of Trump’s nominees did not have that at all.”

Trump has confirmed 56 federal judges to lifetime posts since taking office in 2025, putting him well behind where Biden was by this point in his presidency (84 judges) and where Trump was by this point in his first term (also 84 judges). He’s had fewer vacancies to fill in his second term, though. As of Wednesday, there are 43 vacancies on federal courts.

The question now is whether, and how, the president will work with Democrats to fill these court seats over the next two years.

Asked for comment, a White House official said only, “We expect all judicial nominees pending in the Senate to be confirmed this year.”

There are 22 judicial nominees currently pending in the Senate, in various stages of the process. A senior GOP Senate aide couldn’t say if Republicans would be able to get them all confirmed in the lame duck. But they’re going to try.

“The goal will be to confirm as many as possible,” the aide said, who asked to speak on background as GOP leaders sort out their plans.

Only three of those 22 judicial nominees are ready for floor votes; the rest are awaiting action in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Democrats can’t do much to stop the GOP from churning them through the committee and teeing them up for votes on the Senate floor, if Republican leaders make this a priority.

But Democrats can try to gum up the process. They can make sure they’re all present for every floor vote, for example, which would keep pressure on all Republicans to show up for every vote, too. They can also try to run out the clock and generally make everyone miserable through the use of Senate procedural tactics, like requiring all allotted debate time on every nominee to be used, rather than agreeing to cut it short.

It also may not be smooth sailing for the GOP. Several Republicans just lost reelection, and others aren’t coming back next year, so some may not want to stick around in the lame duck if it drags on.

Before the elections even took place, some GOP senators, annoyed by all the to-do items piling up for the lame duck, were worried about GOP attendance being a problem in the final weeks of the year.

“You never know what kind of mood they’re going to be in after the midterm elections,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters in late September, the day before the Senate went into recess ahead of the elections.

“Somebody’s going to be unhappy, and it could affect their appetite for getting something done,” Kennedy said. “You could have attendance problems. That’s why you want to actually plan.”

Any of Trump’s pending judicial nominees who don’t get confirmed in the lame duck will be back at square one in January, as the White House will need to renominate them and their Senate confirmation process will have to start all over again. Except this time, Democrats will decide how quickly they move.

Come January, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) is poised to become the new chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees judicial nominees. He told HuffPost he’s ready to make some changes to how this panel operates.

“Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Trump administration have gutted the Committee’s oversight and confirmation authority,” Whitehouse said in a statement. “There needs to be accountability for years of Republican bad behavior, and a hard reset on the nominations process next Congress.”

Ben Weiss contributed reporting.