On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent seven more of President Obama's judicial nominees to the full Senate for a final vote. They are joining 16 others currently stuck in procedural quicksand, blocked from confirmation by an intractable and shameless Republican minority.
The clock is ticking, though, on breaking the logjam and getting a vote on any of them before the Senate heads for the exits to go home and campaign. Sadly, it's our badly overburdened judicial system that's getting trampled as Congress rushes out the door.
There has always been a political aspect to the nomination of judges, especially at the appellate level. It's a natural consequence of a process that requires Senate confirmation. But today we are facing unprecedented obstruction from Republicans that crosses the boundary from the acceptably political to an outright assault on long-standing traditions and, more importantly, on the functioning of the federal judiciary itself.
The evidence for how bad things have gotten is spelled out in Alliance for Justice's new report on judicial nominations that covers the Obama Administration's first 20 months in office.
The report shows that President Obama has seen a smaller percentage of his nominees confirmed at this point in his presidency than any president on history. Nominees are held up with secret holds, even those from states where Republican Senators support them. Uncontroversial nominees are reported out of the Judiciary Committee unanimously or with very little opposition, but then are put into the procedural deep freeze and denied a final vote, often for months. Republicans who voted for the nominees in committee then turn around and participate in a deliberate strategy to prevent them from actually taking their seat on the bench. It's getting hard to tell if these are judicial appointees or hostages.
Obviously, the Republicans' desire to obstruct is not based on concerns about qualifications, or, in some cases, even ideology. It's just naked, unabashed obstruction for obstruction's sake. This is a new level of crass political theater that has never before been applied broadly to all judicial nominees, especially those at the district court level. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in yesterday's hearing talked about this trashing of long traditions of Senate behavior, reminding the committee (apparently to no avail), "that when the two home state Senators approved a nominee, when it cleared the background check, and when it cleared the committee, they got a straight up or down vote on the senate floor without procedural obstruction, period.... By erecting a blockade of procedural obstruction for district court nominees ...it is a new threshold that we will cross."
But there's more to this than just political squabbling. There is a genuine crisis in the federal courts. Every time a judicial appointment is delayed, a courtroom remains without a judge.
There are now 49 official "judicial emergencies" in 22 states, where there simply aren't enough judges to hear the cases that have been filed in a timely manner. Thousands of plaintiffs and defendants, many of whose lives and livelihoods depend on the outcome of their case, face long delays. If the principle that "justice delayed is justice denied" is true, then it must be said that Republicans are contributing to the undermining of American justice itself. They may think they're punishing President Obama with their shenanigans, but the collateral damage extends to the American people who are entitled to their day in court.
With the Senate clock ticking away, 23 nominees are waiting for a vote and 23 courts are waiting for a judge.
Perhaps before Senators go home to ask voters to re-elect them, they should do what they were elected to do in the first place and perform their constitutional duty of fully staffing the federal courts.
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The many ways in which this is true should, in a sane society, be enough to leave the Republicans with NO votes in November.
732 confirmed as of 9/12/2010, out of 937 total appointments, lots of judges in the unconfirmed.
the earliest date still not confirmed is:6/8/2009 (Chief counsel of advocacy SBA )
(by the way, what is definition of "Small Business" and why does Bechtel qualify? see Olbermann's latest)
if you go on whitehouse.gov and get appointments
http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/nominations-and-appointments
For Excell excellers, a tabular database website can be downloaded.
I love this new stuff, which is way too hard for me to manipulate, but if you know Excell you can download the data about his appointments, dates, positions, whether they were confirmed or not and when.
I tried to figure out
the range of overdue dates: for instance, appointed in Feb of 2009, and still not confirmed by the senate.
a ratio of importance to his administrative work to the length of obstruction, or
the average and median time from appointment to confirmation.
I wish I could do the fancy data tricks like what percentage of his appointments are high salary appointments blocked to impoverish the dem party...etc..maybe someone else can use my find. I have the concepts but no software skill here... someone help understand please
Republicans have been a pox on this country and they have been campaigning against Obama since January 20th, 2009. They have done a single thing except campaign on empty promises and lies and manipulations!
Get RID of Republicans. They have stopped the country's business from being done for 2 years and it's time to let them know that it's unacceptable! They are hurting all Americans, except their rich friends, in their war on Obama. It's not just granny they've pulled the plug on, it's the American people. VOTE THEM OUT!
YES WE CAN!!!!