Trump Has Seated 17 Federal Judges in Texas – One Vacancy Remains

When President Barack Obama took office, he inherited 54 Article III vacancies in the federal judiciary. Throughout his eight years in office, Obama appointed 108 federal judges. When Obama left office on Jan. 20, 2017, there were approximately 103 openings in the federal judiciary. Eighteen of these vacancies were in Texas-based U.S. District Courts alone, which normally seat 52 federal district court judges.

The number of federal judicial vacancies, in fact, was the reason one Northern District of Texas judge cited in a Nov. 13, 2017, order informing the parties that the U.S. Supreme Court would temporarily assign an out-of-state federal judge to sit in designation and preside over the widely publicized Forest Park Medical Center criminal trial in 2019: