The White House on Tuesday withdrew and replaced one of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, in a last-ditch attempt to fill a key seat on a US appeals court before Democrats take control of the Senate in January.
Trump rescinded the nomination of Arkansas-based US District Judge Lee Rudofsky to the St Louis-based 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals and instead nominated Arkansas Supreme Court Justice J. Cody Hiland, the White House said.
The move comes as the White House and Senate Republicans race to confirm as many judges as possible before Democrats take their seats in January, after winning at least 54 seats in the 3 November midterm elections.
The 8th Circuit hears appeals from federal courts in Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. If Trump secures another appointee on it, 10 of its 11 active judges will have been appointed by Republican presidents, and six by Trump himself.
Trump appointed Rudofsky as a federal district judge in Little Rock in 2019, and prominent conservative lawyers backed his elevation when the seat opened up in August. But his prospects dimmed after the election, when reports emerged that Arkansas’s two Republican senators, John Boozman and Tom Cotton, favoured someone else for the Arkansas seat.
Their opposition drew attention after Mike Davis, a Trump ally at the conservative legal activist group Article III Project, accused them on Friday in a social media post of committing an “unforgivable sin” by jeopardising the seat by blocking Rudofsky.
Hiland has served on Arkansas’s top state court since 2023. He told an audience at an Arkansas law school in August that he had expected to receive the appeals court nomination but was instead offered a federal district judgeship. “And so, being belligerent at times, I said no,” he said, according to a video of the event. “That is not a position that I’m interested in.”
Neither Hiland nor the senators responded to requests for comment. Rudofsky said in a statement that “the reality is that, without the support of my home-state senators, confirmation is simply not a practical possibility in today’s Senate.” He added: “I will be forever grateful to President Trump for the honor of his nomination.”
Sources: Reuters — https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-replaces-judicial-nominee-last-ditch-bid-reshape-us-appeals-court-2026-11-11/
