Thread by @svdate

NEW -- If you like all the progressive judges that Biden has put on the federal bench since taking office, you can thank the person without whom it could never have happened: Donald Trump.

If he hadn't sabotaged GA, it would be a 52-48 Republican Senate.
huffpost.com/entry/trump-jo…

This is probably the most significant consequence of Trump's endless lying about the election having been "stolen" from him (apart from the corrosive effect on democracy).

Trump's actions so far have let Biden put 40 judges on the federal bench. 35 more are in the pipeline.

Warnock and Ossoff won by less than 100,000 votes each. Those two wins gave the Dems the 50-50 tie that VP Harris swings in their favor.

If Trump had just stayed out of Georgia entirely and stopped his lying about the election being "rigged" against him, they would have lost.

And Mitch McConnell would be majority leader right now. Meaning Biden would be nominating more centrist judicial candidates, and even those would likely not be getting on the bench -- certainly not on the appellate courts.

The irony is that Trump frequently bragged about putting 300 conservative judges on the bench in his one term. That was a gross exaggeration, of course. It was only 231, or 234 counting the three Supreme Court justices.

That's a still a whopping number, thanks mainly to McConnell's blocking Obama from confirming most of his appointments in his final two years, and then pushing through Trump's (i.e., Leonard Leo's) appointments assembly-line fashion from 2017-2020.

Now Biden is able to undo a lot of that work, thanks almost entirely to Trump's inability to accept his election loss like a grown-up.