It was November 12th of 2020 and there was a lot going on at the time.

It had been less than a week since the network said called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden.

Donald Trump was just beginning his campaign to deny that result and to try and overturn it.

Just a few days prior, Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani gave his infamous four seasons landscaping press conference to contest the election results.

We all remember that. Trump had decided to deny President-elect Biden access to the classified presidential daily briefing as was the custom in presidential transitions, which in retrospect seems a little bit ironic.

Just one day later, Senator Lindsey Graham would make a phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger asking Raffensberger if he had the power to throw out mail-in ballots from certain counties.

So yeah, a whole lot of wild things were happening on and around November 12th of 2020.

And in the middle of all of that, on that day, the Senate made an incredibly consequential decision that went virtually unnoticed at the time.

The Judiciary, I lean Mercedes-Canon of Florida to be United States District Judge for the Southern District of Florida.

Are there any senators in the chamber wishing to voter, wishing to change their vote?

Seeing none, the yeas are 56, the nays are 21, the nomination is confirmed.

That was the moment. The Senate voted to confirm a young assistant U.S. attorney named Aileen Cannon to a lifetime appointment on the federal judiciary.

12 Democrats voted with Republicans to approve her nomination, including Senator Diane Feinstein, who was the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee at that time.

Now, during his presidency, Trump appointed 231 judges to the federal bench, which was an impressive number.

One of the most successful parts of the entire Trump administration was his reshaping of the federal judiciary.

It was in many ways the reason so many conservatives held their noses and supported Trump, the promises he made and the promises he kept about filling the courts with conservative judges.

So Aileen Cannon was a part of that broader Trump success story at the courts.

But if you were a Democrat and honestly, even if you were a Republican, there were reasons to oppose Judge Cannon's appointment, reasons that went beyond ideology.

At just 38 years old, Aileen Cannon had very little experience for someone nominated to be a federal judge, very little.

She had never held a judgeship before, federal or otherwise.

She had worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in Florida for a few years, but only four of the cases she worked on during that time

went all the way to a jury verdict.

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