This story was originally published May 21, 2019. It has been updated.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is widely credited with cementing a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

But McConnell’s crowning achievement may extend past the Supreme Court. Experts in FRONTLINE’s upcoming documentary McConnell, the GOP & the Court, said that McConnell sees his role in filling the federal judiciary with conservative judges as one of the strongest parts of his legacy.

When President Trump took office and McConnell served as Senate majority leader, Trump had more than 100 vacancies to fill in the lower courts, including 17 in the U.S. courts of appeals — all of them lifetime appointments. The Supreme Court hears around 80 cases a year, while the courts of appeals handle tens of thousands of cases annually — often making them the last word in most cases that impact the lives of Americans.

“[McConnell] has calculated, correctly, that most of the most contentious issues in our society eventually wind up in the courts,” conservative columnist and author Mona Charen told FRONTLINE in a 2023 interview for McConnell, the GOP & the Court. “It is critical, if you want certain outcomes, to be sure that you have the right mix of judges.”

McConnell’s Strategy During Obama’s Presidency

During the first 2020 presidential debate on Sept. 29, President Trump boasted of the “record” number of judges he had appointed, adding that one of the reasons he had the chance to appoint so many was because former President Barack Obama had left so many vacancies.

“When you leave office, you don’t leave any judges,” Trump said. “That’s like, you just don’t do that.”

It wasn’t President Obama’s decision to leave the judicial vacancies, however. Just as McConnell helped cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for decades to come, judicial experts and journalists who spoke to FRONTLINE for Supreme Revenge, a 2019 documentary examining the political battle over the highest court, credited McConnell with holding open vacancies that Trump then filled with conservative federal judges at a breakneck pace.

McConnell himself took credit for the strategy in a December 2019 interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. When Hannity wondered why President Obama left so many vacancies, McConnell said: “I’ll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”

McConnell “completely changed the nature of congressional warfare against Obama and Democratic judicial nominees,” Norman Ornstein, a political scientist at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, told FRONTLINE in 2019.

McConnell was exposed to the machinations of judicial appointments early in his career, when he worked for Marlow Cook, a U.S. senator from Kentucky who sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. During his time as a staffer for Cook, McConnell saw two of President Richard Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees rejected.

“It was in those years that McConnell really came to understand the importance, the centrality of judicial nominations in our political system, both the Supreme Court nominations and also … federal lower-court nominations,” Alec MacGillis, a ProPublica reporter and author of “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” told FRONTLINE in 2019.

The young McConnell also learned “what it takes to get these nominations through the Senate, to really kind of figure out how to win that game, the game of judicial politics,” MacGillis said.

Those lessons proved useful when McConnell took on leadership positions in the Senate. Senate Republicans were in the minority for much of Obama’s tenure, but under McConnell’s leadership they employed filibusters to slow down or block the confirmation of judicial nominees — a tactic Democrats had used under President George W. Bush. GOP senators also withheld “blue slips,” which were traditionally given to the two senators from the home state of a judicial nominee for their approval or rejection.

In order to overcome those efforts to stall appointments, in November 2013 then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats changed the rules, eliminating filibusters for federal judicial and executive branch nominees, with the exception of Supreme Court nominees.

At the time, McConnell told the Democrats, “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.” When Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015, confirmations of Obama’s judicial nominees slowed to a crawl.

According to the Congressional Research Service, only 28.6 percent of Obama’s judicial nominees were confirmed during the last two years of his presidency, the lowest percentage of confirmations from 1977 to 2022, the years the report covered.

Trump’s Judicial Appointments, With McConnell’s Help

When Trump won the 2016 election, Senate Majority Leader McConnell employed the “nuclear option” when Senate Republicans ended filibusters for Supreme Court nominees — stymieing attempts from Democrats to block Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.

Thirty of President Trump’s appeals court nominees were confirmed during his first two years of office. According to CRS, that was the greatest number of appeals court nominees confirmed by the Senate in the first two years of any presidency since it started tracking that data.

President Trump maintained his pace through the last two years of his term and appointed 54 appeals court judges during his 4-year tenure — a higher number than any other recent president, with the exception of President Jimmy Carter. (By comparison, President Obama appointed 55 appeals court judges over the course of eight years.)

By the end of his term, Trump confirmed a total of 228 judges across the appeals and district courts. They were mostly young, white and male. They would go on to decide cases about elections, voting rights, immigration, the environment, labor, abortion, gun control and other issues that impact the lives of Americans. They will remain on the courts for their lifetimes.

Biden’s Impact on the Judiciary

When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, Sen. McConnell once again became Senate minority leader, with fewer tools at his disposal to shape the makeup of the nation’s judges.

Amid that new dynamic, President Biden has left his own mark on the judiciary, nominating demographically diverse candidates. In June, Biden confirmed his 100th district court judge, which put him ahead of Trump’s figures at the same point in his tenure, though it’s unclear if that pace can continue through the end of his term.

As Biden’s push for judicial nominees has reached purple and red states, Republican senators have been slow to return “blue slips,” a tactic they used during the Obama administration, to thwart some of those nominations. That means Biden has struggled to confirm judges in southern states, especially those with two Republican senators. The Democrats’ leader in the House and some progressive groups have pushed for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee chair to do away with the “blue slip” practice.

The new confirmations came at a time when a number of high profile Supreme Court rulings and controversies have affected public perception of the federal judiciary, including scandals that led to calls for the Supreme Court to adopt an ethics code. McConnell has defended the Supreme Court, arguing that it is less polarized than the public believes and describing it as “ideologically unpredictable.”

Still, experts have told FRONTLINE, the effectiveness of the judiciary — whether at a district court level or the high court — does depend in part on the public’s belief in their independence from party politics.

“The courts rule and expect their decisions to be obeyed based upon a sense among the public, fostered by our Constitution, that they are the ultimate arbiters,” Jamie Gorelick, who served as deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, told FRONTLINE in 2018. “They don’t have a standing army. They have no way to enforce their rules. Their rulings are enforced by the majesty of the courts.”

“If the American public comes to believe that this is just another political body, that you can count a Republican vote or Democratic vote, that this is a process that is easily manipulated by politicians, it hugely diminishes the courts and their ability to perform their function under the Constitution,” she said.

As the documentary McConnell, the GOP & the Court recounts, federal courts hold a unique power to McConnell to shape American policies in a lasting way that Congress, legislation and policy cannot. To McConnell, his role in shaping the judiciary has been a signature accomplishment, according to Dan Balz, who covers national politics, the presidency and Congress at The Washington Post.

“His overriding priority was to remake the federal judiciary,” Balz said. McConnell’s efforts not only shaped the makeup of lower courts, Balz noted, but also built a pipeline of conservative judges who would go on to serve in more powerful positions.

“When there were openings on the appellate courts and ultimately the Supreme Court, you had people who were fully experienced and ready to go and ready to step in and be nominated for the Supreme Court, that being obviously the ultimate goal,” he said.

McConnell, the GOP & the Court will be available to watch in full at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS App starting Oct. 31, 2023, at 7/6c. It will premiere on PBS stations (check local listings) and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel at 10/9c.

This story was sourced in part using FRONTLINE’s Transparency Project. We’ve created new ways for our audiences to search, experience and share the in-depth interviews that we use to make our films. You can explore the 39 interviews used in the making of Supreme Revenge in an interactive archive that includes all the quotes from the film in their original context, plus hours of insights, analysis and stories not included in the final cut.

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