By Nate Raymond
Nov 5 (Reuters) – US President Donald Trump is moving to nominate a Republican member of the Texas Supreme Court who voters ousted from office in Tuesday’s election to become a life-tenured federal judge, according to US Senate records made public on Thursday.
Trump has not announced any such nomination. But the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee has received paperwork to begin considering outgoing Texas Supreme Court Justice James Sullivan to serve as a federal judge in Austin.
His nomination to a seat on the US District Court for the Western District of Texas will be taken up by the Senate during the lame-duck session in the final weeks before Democrats take control of the chamber in January.
The White House and Sullivan did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Republicans are pushing to confirm nearly two dozen pending judicial nominees and add to 56 confirmed so far during Trump’s second term before they hand over control of the Senate to Democrats.
Trump made 234 judicial appointments in his first term, including three Supreme Court justices, helping shift the federal judiciary’s ideological balance to the right.
Over Democrats’ objections, Republican US Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the committee’s outgoing chair, scheduled judicial nomination hearings in consecutive weeks starting November 10, departing from the panel’s typical practice of holding them every other week.
Sullivan, 45, was appointed to the Texas Supreme Court in January 2025 to fill a vacancy on the state’s top court by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who lost his bid for reelection on Tuesday to Democrat Gina Hinojosa.
Democrats in the election won all four seats up for a vote on the state’s nine-member high court, shrinking the Republican majority on the Texas Supreme Court to 5-4.
Sullivan’s campaign website touted him as “bold,” “relentless,” and “conservative.” He lost Tuesday’s election to Chari Kelly, a Democrat, and in a Senate questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sullivan noted his candidacy to retain his seat had been “unsuccessful.”
Such questionnaires are submitted to the committee by the US Department of Justice, and the Trump administration at times has submitted them before nominations have been officially announced.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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