Seventh Circuit’s Sykes to Step Back, Give Trump New Vacancy (1)

Seventh Circuit Chief Judge Diane Sykes plans to give up her active seat, giving President Donald Trump a vacancy to fill on a court narrowly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees.

Sykes, 67, plans to assume senior status, a form of semi-retirement, on Oct. 1, according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts website for future vacancies.

The George W. Bush appointee is a 21-year veteran of the Chicago-based court who presides in Milwaukee.

She’s the second appellate judge after the Ninth Circuit’s Sandra Segal Ikuta to announce plans to step away from active service since Trump took office in January, giving him six circuit seats to fill.

He made 54 lifetime appointments to the appeals courts in his first term, including four to the Seventh Circuit. His next one to that court would maintain a 6-5 edge for Republican-appointed judges.

Sykes attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. A former journalist, she was a reporter for The Milwaukee Journal before earning her law degree at Marquette University.

Sykes clerked for Judge Terence T. Evans of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin after law school and worked in private practice before being elected a state trial judge in 1992. She was appointed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1999 by Gov. Tommy G. Thompson (R) and later elected to maintain her seat.

She’s been on the Supreme Court shortlists of two Republican presidents since her appointment to the Seventh Circuit in 2004, including those of George W. Bush to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, and Trump during his first term to replace Antonin Scalia.

Sykes, who has described herself “loosely an originalist-textualist,” dissented in 2017 from the Seventh Circuit’s 8-3 decision that found Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits sexual orientation discrimination.

“We are not authorized to infuse the text with a new or unconventional meaning or to update it to respond to changed social, economic or political conditions,” Sykes wrote.