By Tierney Sneed

(CNN) — The Democrats’ coming takeover of the Senate has kickstarted a scramble to confirm two dozen of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees before Republicans turn over the gavel in January.

The mad dash included a November 4 call from Republican Sen. Ted Cruz to a top lawyer in Trump’s Justice Department to solicit the lawyer’s interest in filing a seat in Texas, after the state elected James Talarico, a Democrat who will have veto power over district court nominees. Trump formally announced the nomination of T. Elliot Gaiser, the head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, less than a week later.

But the compressed timeline has also heightened clashes between the White House and Republican senators over the president’s choices.

The stalemates already forced a switcheroo this week of Trump’s choice for an appeals court seat, potentially slowing down the timeline for filling it, while at least one other district court nomination in Oklahoma may be imperiled because of the resistance of a Republican home state senator.

Trump’s remaking of the judiciary – from the Supreme Court on down in his first term – could arguably be the longest-lasting legacy of his presidency. Right-leaning judges could continue to serve as a check on Democrats, by striking down their policies, if they expand their power in Washington in 2028 and beyond.

In his second term, Trump has not been able to match the record-breaking number of judicial confirmations he achieved in his first administration, particularly on influential appeals courts, as he returned to the White House with far fewer vacancies to fill than the start of his first term. Now, Republicans are anticipating the possibility that Democrats won’t allow any of his nominees to be confirmed once they take Senate control, raising the stakes for getting every possible judge approved in the next month and a half.

With little time to spend for negotiation over who the president selects, tensions are flaring within the conservative legal community over how local politics are getting in the way of confirming judges with the bona fides they prefer.

“Trump has set precedents where he will roll over for the state senators,” said Joshua Blackman, a South Texas College of Law professor and a conservative who has written extensively about judicial nomination battles. “And we have the picks who probably are not the best picks as a result.”

Republican leaders are juggling this infighting with the threats of Democratic procedural maneuvers that will jam up the process of confirming Trump’s nominees.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has set an aggressive calendar to push the remaining nominees through the pipeline – prompting Democratic accusations that the GOP is breaking Senate norms – while leadership is charting out a path for moving the nominees along on the Senate floor along with other priorities.

“We’re going to make every second count, and that means all these judicial appointments,” Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the Republican whip, said Tuesday. “We’re going to do everything we can to get every single one of them confirmed.”

GOP infighting over Trump’s choices

The first post-election Judiciary Committee meeting Tuesday kicked off with sparring between its chair, Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley and Sen. Dick Durbin, its top Democrat, about the lengths Republicans were willing to go to speed Trump’s nominees through.

But soon after, it became clear that the calendar was not the only problem.

Plans to for the committee to vote Tuesday on two nominees to Oklahoma’s federal court were derailed by the opposition that one of the nominees, Zachary West, faces from the junior senator from the state, Republican Sen. Alan Armstrong, according to a source familiar with the nominations process.

Supporting Armstrong in his opposition, according to the source, is North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, meaning that West would struggle to get out of the committee, which Tillis serves on.

So far, the White House is standing by Trump’s choice, with an official telling CNN Wednesday that the “President has selected two highly qualified nominees for the district court in Oklahoma, and we are confident they will be confirmed.”

But the White House on Tuesday night had to reverse course on a nomination for an Arkansas seat on the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals, after the home state senators balked at the choice over their preferred candidate.

The canned nominee, US District Judge Lee Rudofsky, was widely celebrated by the conservative legal movement for the decisions he has issued from his current perch on the trial-level federal court in Arkansas. Rudofsky had already had his hearing and would have been primed for a vote out of the Judiciary Committee by next week.

The 8th Circuit already has a deep right-lean, but the seat had significance for Trump-aligned legal advocates because filling it will mean that he appointed a majority of judges on that court.

Now, Republicans will go back to square one and schedule a new hearing from the freshly announced nominee, Arkansas Supreme Court Justice J. Cody Hiland.

“The committee is carefully vetting Hiland’s nomination,” a committee spokesperson told CNN. “As chairman, Senator Grassley has discretion to set the committee’s schedule and is working to efficiently process President Trump’s pending judicial nominees.”

That conservative legal world was already grousing about the current nominee for a Mississippi seat on the 5th Circuit Trump is trying to fill this Congress, who has the support of the senior Republican senator from the state, Sen. Roger Wicker, but is not seen as a reliable vote for the right’s most cherished causes.

According to Blackman, the movement would have preferred a candidate like Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, who argued successfully at the Supreme Court for overturning nationwide abortion protections. The current nominee, Todd Butler, is a former clerk for the retiring 5th Circuit judge he is set to replace, and according to his application paperwork, he received outreach from Wicker before the vacancy was publicly announced.

“They’re jamming (the White House) up, and I think Trump is just going along with it because he has other stuff he’s worrying about,” Blackman said.

Like Texas, Mississippi flipped a Senate seat, with Democrat Scott Colom projected to beat Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. (Colom, a local district attorney, ran for the seat after Hyde-Smith blocked his nomination to a judgeship by President Joe Biden).

When Trump announced Gaiser’s nomination on Tuesday, he also rolled out nominations for another judicial vacancy in Texas – choosing a Texas Supreme Court justice who just lost his reelection for that seat – and in South Carolina, which elected Democrat Annie Andrews to the Senate.

Democrats have speculated that local politics could get in the way of confirmation of Gaiser, and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a retiring Republican who also sits on the Judiciary Committee, told the AP he had concerns about how the White House has tried to “air-drop” somebody into the vacancy.

The attorney did not go through the usual process Texas senators use to vet nominees, and Democrats have zeroed in on his limited ties to Texas, which they say amount to just a clerkship in Houston while spending the rest of his career in Ohio or Washington, DC.

Race against the clock

To push through, Grassley has previewed an all-gas-no-breaks approach in his committee – an approach he said Tuesday was justified by signals that Democrats could block any nominee Trump tried to put forward next Congress.

“They’re planning to stonewall a president’s ability to appoint judges – now that is what is unprecedented,” Grassley said at Tuesday’s committee meeting. “So yes, I’m working. I’m going to work hard to get judges confirmed quickly during the lame duck session.”

Under the normal Senate timelines, nominees will need to get their confirmation hearing before the committee by next week if Republicans want to get them on the Senate floor by mid-December, before lawmakers leave for the holidays.

Democrats argue that Grassley is violating procedures in how he is orchestrating that final push. They’ve pointed to norms around having judicial hearings at least two weeks apart (a plan for a November 18 hearing comes after a confirmation hearing on November 10) and giving the Senate committee at least 28 days to review the paper applications – known as Senate Judiciary Questionaries – that are submitted with their nominations.

“Don’t be surprised if some of these violations have now become routine enough to be followed in the future,” Durbin, who is retiring after this year, warned Tuesday.

Grassley countered with examples of Democrats also violating those rules when they held the gavel. Regardless, once Republicans get the nominees out of committee and on to the Senate floor, Democrats have leverage in slowing down the process. Unless Republicans can reach a deal with Democrats, the Senate must devote 30 hours of floor time for appeals court nominees. Only two hours of floor are necessary for district court nominees, but even that could be a burden while the Senate also tries to pass a significant piece of permitting reform legislation.

Thune took a step towards navigating those competing interests on Wednesday, by laying the groundwork for the Senate to stick around through Friday – an uncommon work day for a chamber that usually wraps up by Thursday early afternoon – for opening votes that would start the floor clock on a tranche of district court and appellate nominees.

Democrats have the ability to make the floor process “excruciating” for Republicans, said John P. Collins, a professor at George Washington Law School who focuses on judicial nominations.

Historically, the parties have been able reach deals at the end of a Congress, when senators are eager to get home for the holidays, that allow for the quick confirmation of some nominees in exchange for leaving others behind.

But, Collins said, Republicans have also traditionally been more impassioned about judicial confirmations than Democrats.

“They might be more willing to stay up late in the night to hold all these votes in a way that Democrats were not.”

CNN’s Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.

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