WASHINGTON — President Trump will name nearly a dozen judges as nominees for key posts as he works to pack the nation’s federal courts with more conservative voices.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Monday that among the candidates are individuals previously named on President Trump’s list of 21 possible picks for Supreme Court justice.
Trump will nominate Joan Larsen, who currently serves on Michigan’s Supreme Court, to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, and David Stras, a justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court bench, to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.
Spicer said that another eight nominees would be named later. All the nominees require Senate confirmation.
The announcement comes less than a month after Trump’s final pick for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, was confirmed as justice to the nation’s highest court, restoring the court’s conservative tilt.
While appeals courts tend to have a lower public profile, their role in adjudicating many of the orders and laws put forth by the administration will be significant.
Trump’s earliest efforts to implement his agenda were dramatically derailed by the courts, which pushed back against his proposed travel ban and his order to withhold funding from ‘‘sanctuary cities’’ that limit cooperation with immigration authorities.
After the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected his immigration ban, Trump emphatically tweeted last February ‘‘See you in court!’’ The administration vowed that it would re-appeal the ruling and either revise its original executive order or write a new one from scratch. But while a revised ban was later released, that too was blocked by the courts.
Trump said last month that he is considering breaking up the Ninth Circuit, a federal appeals court that covers Western states and which has long been a target of Republicans.
It would take congressional action to break up the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Republicans have introduced bills this year to do just that.
Larsen, a former professor at the University of Michigan law school, has served on the Michigan Supreme Court bench since November 2015 and has written majority opinions in four cases.
She was a law clerk to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative giant on the court, and spoke at a memorial following his death in February. She also served in the Justice Department when George W. Bush was president.
Stras formerly clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and is known to share the view of a limited role for the judiciary.
In a separate development Monday, the Senate confirmed Trump’s choice to be Air Force secretary. Heather Wilson is Trump’s first service secretary nominee to be approved by the chamber, after fits and starts for several nominees.
Trump’s choices for secretaries of the Army and Navy were forced to withdraw from consideration. Mark Green, Trump’s second choice for Army secretary, stepped aside late last week amid growing criticism over his remarks about Muslims, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans.
The president’s first pick to be the Army’s top civilian, Vincent Viola, dropped out in early February because of financial entanglements, and about three weeks later Philip Bilden, the Navy secretary nominee, withdrew for similar reasons.
Wilson, a former representative from New Mexico, faced scrutiny from Democrats during her confirmation hearing before the Armed Services Committee for defense industry consulting work she did after leaving Congress in 2009.
She collected nearly half a million dollars in questionable payments from federally funded nuclear labs, the Energy Department’s inspector general said in a 2013 report. Wilson failed to provide documentation for the consulting work she did to earn $20,000 a month from the Los Alamos and Sandia national labs in New Mexico from January 2009 to March 2011, the report said.
Wilson denied any impropriety and said she complied fully with her contract for the consulting services.
Wilson served as an Air Force officer in Europe during the 1980s and was on the National Security Council staff under then-president George H.W. Bush during the fall of the Berlin Wall. She would be would be the first Air Force Academy graduate to serve as Air Force secretary if confirmed by the Senate.
She graduated from the academy in 1982 and later earned master’s and doctoral degrees as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England.
She served five terms in Congress, where she was a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and chaired the House Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence. She also served on the House Armed Services Committee.