U.S. President Donald Trump's latest slate of nine judicial nominees includes an Oklahoma state attorney who backed allowing taxpayer-funded religious charter schools, as well as a nominee to fill an Alaska seat left vacant after a judge Trump appointed in his first term resigned amid a sexual misconduct scandal.
Trump, in a series of posts on his social media platform Truth Social late on Tuesday, announced nominees for district court seats in six states, as time dwindles for the Republican-led Senate to confirm new judges before a potential shift in party control after the November 3 midterm elections.
The nine nominees, if confirmed by the Senate, would become life-tenured district court judges in Oklahoma, Alaska, Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Florida, all Republican-led states.
Based on the Senate's calendar, the nominees would likely not be able to go before the full chamber for confirmation votes until the lame-duck period after the midterm elections that Democrats hope will give them control of the Senate.
One judicial pick whose nomination prompted cheers online from some conservative legal activists is Zach West, who has worked in the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office first as solicitor general and later as director of special litigation.
Trump, in nominating West to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, called him "a zealous advocate for the Constitution, Religious Liberty, and the Rule of Law."
As a lawyer for the state, West pushed the U.S. Supreme Court to stop President Joe Biden's administration from stripping the state of millions of dollars in federal funding for family planning projects after Oklahoma stopped referrals to pregnancy counseling that could provide information about abortion.
In December 2022, he signed a memo alongside the state's outgoing attorney general, Republican John O’Connor, that argued that a state law blocking religious schools from participating in Oklahoma's charter school program was unconstitutional.
That memo helped spur a bid by two Catholic dioceses to establish in Oklahoma the nation's first taxpayer-funded religious charter school. But the U.S. Supreme Court in May 2025 blocked the bid, leaving intact an Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that held it violated the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment limits on government involvement in religion.
A second Oklahoma-based nominee Trump announced on Tuesday, Trevor Pemberton, is a former Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals judge and general counsel to Governor Kevin Stitt who was nominated to a seat in the state's Eastern District.
In Alaska, Trump said he was moving to elevate U.S. Magistrate Judge Kyle Reardon to fill a seat that had been vacant for two years following the departure of former U.S. District Judge Joshua Kindred, a Trump appointee who resigned in 2024 after an inquiry found that he fostered an inappropriate sexualized relationship with one of his law clerks and created a hostile work environment for court employees.
In Texas, Trump is nominating federal prosecutor Courtney Coker to serve as a judge in the state's Northern District, and Richard Bennett, a magistrate judge who previously worked for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to serve in Texas's Southern District.
Trump also is nominating Brad Kelley, a partner at law firm Littler Mendelson, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Mansfield to serve in the Eastern District of Louisiana; Daniel Ballou, a state court judge in Kentucky, to serve in the Eastern District of Kentucky; and Robert Long, a judge on Florida’s First District Court of Appeal, to serve in the Middle District of Florida.
