BREAKING: Judge Jeffrey Sutton, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, will be taking senior status on October 1, giving President Donald Trump a new nominee on the court.

Sutton, a George W. Bush appointee who has been on the bench since 2003, told Trump of his plans the same day that Trump maligned justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and their families from the White House briefing room — a juxtaposition that helps explain why fewer judges have been taking senior status in the second Trump administration that was expected.

Sutton, who is only 65, is an extremely conservative judge and was a leading lawyer in the right’s ideological efforts to transform the law before becoming a judge, but he essentially ruined his once-likely chance of at least being a Supreme Court short-lister by writing the Sixth Circuit opinion upholding Obamacare in 2011.

Despite that, in most areas, Sutton has been not only a reliable vote on the right but a leading voice for efforts to push the law further and further to the right.

He authored both the Sixth Circuit’s opinion more than a decade ago upholding bans on same-sex couple’s marriages — the only appeals court to do so in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act at the federal level — and, more recently, the court’s opinion upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.