Senate set to confirm Texas judge as last chance before midterm recess closes the confirmation window

The Senate returns from a pro-forma weekend Tuesday afternoon with one item left on the judicial calendar before lawmakers scatter for five weeks: a confirmation vote on Angela Veronica Colmenero, whom President Trump has nominated to fill a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. If cloture clears at 5:30 p.m., a final confirmation vote follows. If it fails, Colmenero's nomination almost certainly dies in the 119th Congress.

The stakes are narrow but concrete. The Southern District of Texas handles the country's largest volume of federal immigration cases. Whoever sits in the seat vacated by Judge Lee H. Rosenthal, who retired after decades on the bench, will rule on deportation, asylum, and border-enforcement questions for years.

A closing window, not a routine vote

The Senate stands adjourned until 3:00 p.m. Tuesday, September 22, with one scheduled vote that evening at 5:30 p.m. on cloture on the Colmenero nomination. The chamber will then be out again for five weeks beginning the week of October 5, until after the midterms. That gap makes Tuesday's vote the last realistic opportunity to add a Trump judge to the federal bench before Election Day shifts the political equation entirely.

Limited time remains to confirm judges in 2026, and the results of the midterm elections could dramatically alter judicial nominations as Congress moves into the 120th Congress next year.

Colmenero is one of four judicial nominees who remained pending on the floor as the Senate left for its August recess. The others are Daniel Domenico for the Tenth Circuit, Kasdin Mitchell for the Northern District of Texas, and Matthew Byrne for the Southern District of Ohio.

Domenico, Mitchell, and Byrne have each already cleared the chamber in recent weeks, according to the Senate Judiciary Committee's nomination tracker, leaving Colmenero as the last name on the list. Earlier this week, the Senate invoked cloture on a related nomination by a 49-to-47 vote and then confirmed the nominee 49 to 45. Those margins show how thin the Republican majority is running with midterm-related absences.

Who Colmenero is

Colmenero, born in 1979 in Austin, served as interim Texas attorney general from July 14 to September 16, 2023, and is currently the deputy chief of staff to Governor Greg Abbott, having previously served as his principal deputy general counsel from 2021 to 2023.

On May 11, 2026, Trump announced his intention to nominate Colmenero to an undesignated seat on the Southern District of Texas, and on May 12, he formally nominated her to the seat vacated by Judge Rosenthal. Her nomination was reported to the full Senate by an 11-to-10 party-line vote on July 16, 2026. The split in committee previews what majority leader John Thune is working with on the floor.

Thune filed cloture on Colmenero's nomination, Executive Calendar No. 828, setting up Tuesday's procedural gauntlet. A simple majority is enough to invoke cloture on district court nominees under the rules the Senate changed in 2013 and extended in 2017, but Republicans hold only a narrow margin and any absence matters.

The broader confirmation race

Fifty-three lifetime judicial nominees have been confirmed so far during Trump's second term. Whether that number reaches 54 before November depends entirely on what happens Tuesday evening at 5:30 p.m.

The Southern District of Texas seat carries particular weight given the court's caseload. The district, which covers Houston and stretches to the Mexican border, has been a staging ground for major immigration litigation since at least 2017. The judge who fills Rosenthal's seat will inherit a docket heavy with asylum and enforcement cases that often generate national precedent.

The Congressional Record confirms the Senate's program for Tuesday: the chamber will resume consideration of the Colmenero nomination and vote on the motion to invoke cloture at 5:30 p.m.

One more piece of election-year judicial business

Separate from the confirmation queue, a Supreme Court emergency order handed down September 4 is already shaping how candidates and party committees buy broadcast time in the final stretch before November. On September 4, the first day of the lowest-unit-charge window for the November general election, the Supreme Court granted an emergency stay of the Fourth Circuit's order in Brown v. FCC, reinstating the FCC Media Bureau's March 2026 public notice on broadcast ad rates for political party advertising.

The dispute turns on whether the FCC's discounted "lowest unit charge" rate, which federal law guarantees to candidates, also extends to party committees making coordinated expenditures with those candidates. In March 2026, the FCC's Media Bureau issued a public notice clarifying that joint fundraising committees with noncandidate members and political parties engaged in coordinated activity could qualify for the rate under certain conditions. Four Democratic congressional candidates challenged this interpretation, arguing only candidates should receive the discount.

On August 25, 2026, the Fourth Circuit issued an opinion setting aside the FCC public notice, with a 2-to-1 majority holding that the Communications Act does not extend the lowest unit charge to political parties or joint fundraising committees with non-candidate members. The Supreme Court's emergency stay reversed that, for now, putting the discount back in play just as general-election ad spending was set to ramp up.

The NRCC and NRSC had argued that allowing the Fourth Circuit ruling to take effect immediately would upend advertising arrangements already being made for the 2026 campaign. The Court agreed, provisionally. A full merits ruling will come later, but by then the election will be over.

The Supreme Court temporarily paused the Fourth Circuit ruling, allowing candidates and other committees that jointly fundraise with them to access discounted rates for broadcast advertising. The Campaign Legal Center, which filed an amicus brief urging the Court to let the Fourth Circuit ruling stand, called the FCC guidance an unlawful extension of a discount the law reserves for candidates alone.

What to Watch

• Tuesday, September 22, 5:30 p.m.: The Senate proceeds to a roll call vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the Colmenero nomination, with further roll call votes possible during Tuesday's session. Watch for Republican absences; a single no-show could sink the nomination.
• Kasdin Mitchell, Northern District of Texas: Mitchell's nomination is scheduled for debate September 22 as well, by unanimous consent agreement. Confirmation would add a second Trump judge to a district that has been central to challenges against federal regulation.
• Brown v. FCC on the merits: The Supreme Court's stay in the lowest-unit-charge case is temporary. The full Commission has not yet resolved the Democrats' original administrative challenge, and a merits ruling could reshape how party committees spend on broadcast advertising in every election cycle going forward.
• Judicial vacancies after November: If Democrats pick up Senate seats in the midterms, the calculus on Trump nominees shifts immediately in January. The pace and ideological profile of nominees confirmed in this final pre-election stretch will be among the most-watched data points for court-watchers tracking the next Congress.

Sources: Congressional Record, Congress.gov | U.S. Senate Daily Press, Sept. 18, 2026 | U.S. Senate Periodical Press Gallery floor log | Senate Judiciary Committee nominations tracker | Congress.gov, PN999-1 (Colmenero nomination) | White House nominations release, May 12, 2026 | Wikipedia: Angela Colmenero | Justia: NRCC v. Brown, 609 U.S. ___ (2026) | LII/Cornell: 26A274 per curiam order | Nomination Notes, Aug. 2026 | Campaign Legal Center: Brown v. FCC case page