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Republicans Might Regret Putting Emil Bove on the Bench

By Brendan Ballou
August 2, 2025, 8 AM ET

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Since he first took office, in 2017, Trump has maintained the support of Senate Republicans in part through a simple bargain: They put up with his obvious unfitness for office, and in exchange, he appoints reliably conservative judges to the federal courts. But by appointing Bove—whose only apparent loyalty is to his own ambition, not to any particular legal philosophy—the GOP might have limited its own ability to appoint judges in the future. This is because the president typically gets to appoint new judges only when old ones die, retire, or move into the quasi-retirement position of “senior status.” And some judges, even conservative ones who would otherwise be happy to let a Republican president pick their replacement, are likely to delay their retirement rather than hand Trump the opportunity to make more Bove-style appointments.

The evidence suggests that this is already happening. Many federal judges time their retirement based on which party is in power: Democrat-appointed judges are likelier to retire when a Democrat is president, Republican-appointed judges when a Republican is. So far through Trump’s second term, however, conservative judges aren’t retiring at the pace they typically do. An analysis by Bloomberg Law found that 26 judicial seats opened up from the beginning of the year through the first five months of Trump’s first term, as did 57 judicial seats during the same period of Joe Biden’s presidency. By contrast, through June 1 of his second term, Trump gained just 16 vacancies to fill. Ursula Ungaro, a retired judge appointed by George W. Bush, told Bloomberg Law that she’d heard a “hint or two” that her former peers “would stay beyond their eligibility for senior status to see what happens toward the end of the Trump administration.”

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