President Trump’s judicial appointments have been a sustained campaign to stack the federal courts for the donor class, and his announcement that he will elevate Arkansas federal Judge Lee Rudofsky to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals continues the project. “Lee will be a rock solid defender of the Constitution,” Mr. Trump wrote online. The record bears that out — in the direction Mr. Trump intended.
Judge Rudofsky, 47, has sat on the court in the Eastern District of Arkansas since Mr. Trump put him there in 2019. He previously was the solicitor general of Arkansas and a lawyer at Walmart — private-sector prestige followed by a state appellate post, the conveyor belt from corporate defense to the bench. After graduating from Cornell and Harvard Law, he clerked on the Ninth Circuit, but for a George H.W. Bush appointee, so don’t hold that clerkship against him.
Over the past seven years, Judge Rudofsky has built a record as a jurist willing to use an originalist framework to dismantle the legal tools that voters and students use to protect themselves. In 2022 he ruled that private parties cannot sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the provision meant to let voters themselves enforce their rights against discriminatory maps (Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment). Civil rights lawyers treated his reading of the law as a license for map-drawers to suppress, and it was upheld on appeal.
This summer Judge Rudofsky dismissed the equal protection claim from a lawsuit challenging Arkansas’s ban on critical-race theory in public schools (Walls v. Sanders). “A desire to protect students from ‘left-wing indoctrination’ is not tantamount to a discriminatory intent or purpose to adversely impact African American students,” the judge wrote. “End of story.” The “end of story” is what the donor class wanted: a state may forbid teaching about American racism, Black students left without recourse when state curricula erase the history of their own subordination, and the families they come from have nowhere to appeal.
If the Senate confirms him to the Eighth Circuit, he will fill a seat opened by Judge Bobby Shepherd, who is taking senior status. When Mr. Trump named Judge Rudofsky to the district court, he was backed by both home-state Senators, John Boozman and Tom Cotton. His record of taking remedies away from voters and equal protection away from Black children now commands broad Republican support as he is considered for a promotion.
Judicial capture compounds when loyalists open seats for more loyalists. The Rudofsky nomination is a reassuring message to older conservative judges, especially after Mr. Trump’s second-term theater of attacking the judiciary. The White House wants the bench packed with jurists who will deliver the outcomes the donor class cannot win at the ballot box.
If Republicans lose the Senate in November — which is now the likeliest outcome — the runway for further confirmations will shut down in January. Older conservative jurists, close to retirement, will be leaned on to clear seats for their own Judge Rudofsky before the window closes. Perhaps they would prefer to make way soon for the next one.
