Sixth Circuit Judge Sutton to Step Back, Hand Trump Vacancy (1)

Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, who wrote notable opinions upholding both Obamacare and same-sex marriage bans, plans to step away from active status, handing President Donald Trump a rare appellate vacancy to fill as judges have been slow to retire in his second presidency.

Sutton will take a form of partial retirement known as senior status on Oct. 1, he advised Trump in a letter on Friday.

Sutton has served in Columbus, Ohio, since his 2003 appointment by George W. Bush. He assumed the role of chief judge in 2021.

Trump has had few opportunities to appoint new judges on the appeals courts this term, as the pipeline of vacancies has dried up.

He’s had only seven life-tenured seats on the circuit courts to fill since his return to office in January 2025. Trump made 54 appointments to those courts last time.

Nominees are subject to Senate confirmation.

The Sixth Circuit covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee and is based in Cincinnati.

Landmark Cases

Sutton has presided over major cases that would later make their way to the Supreme Court and result in landmark decisions.

He sided with the Obama administration in 2011 to uphold the president’s sweeping health insurance reform law known as Obamacare. “Not every intrusive law is an unconstitutionally intrusive law,” Sutton, the first Republican-appointed judge to back the law in litigation across the country at the time, said in his opinion. The Supreme Court later affirmed the constitutionality of the law in a 5-4 decision.

Sutton authored the Sixth Circuit’s 2014 opinion that upheld same-sex marriage bans in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan. That case later made its way to the high court, with the justices ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that marriage is a fundamental right guaranteed to same-sex couples, overturning the Sixth Circuit’s decision.

Last month, Sutton dismissed the Justice Department’s misconduct complaint that accused the chief judge of Washington’s federal trial court of making “improper” remarks about Trump at a closed-door judiciary meeting last year. Chief Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg is overseeing high-profile litigation over the administration’s decision to send alleged gang members to a Salvadoran prison under a wartime deportation authority.

The complaint, filed last year by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s then-chief of staff Chad Mizelle, alleged Boasberg suggested the Trump administration would disregard federal court rulings and prompt “a constitutional crisis” while speaking at a meeting for the Judicial Conference, the judiciary’s policymaking body.

In Arizona v. Biden, Sutton argued in his 2022 concurrence that nationwide injunctions “seem to take the judicial power beyond its traditionally understood uses, permitting district courts to order the government to act or refrain from acting toward nonparties in the case.” In 2025, the high court’s conservative majority ruled in Trump v. CASA that judges couldn’t issue such nationwide orders.

Scalia Clerk

Before joining the bench, Sutton worked at Jones Day and later served as Ohio’s solicitor general from 1995 to 1998.

He also clerked for Justices Lewis F. Powell Jr. and Antonin Scalia.

Scalia at one point told a group of students in 2008 at American University’s law school that Sutton was “one of the very best law clerks” he’s ever had, according to the New York Times.