As noted yesterday in an ACSblog guest post by Glenn Sugameli, senators left town yesterday without confirming one nominee, and that now the situation is only likely to worsen. In his letter, Obama noted that the Senate recessed "without confirming a single one of the 23 Federal judicial nominations pending on the Executive Calendar."
Obama wrote:
At this time in the prior Administration (107 th Congress), the Senate had confirmed 61% of the President's judicial nominations. By contrast, the Senate has confirmed less than half of the judicial nominations it has received in my Administration. Nominees in the 107 th Congress waited less than a month on the floor of the senate before a vote on their confirmation. The men and women whom I have nominated who have been confirmed to the Court of Appeals waited five times longer and those confirmed to the District Courts waited three times longer for final votes.
And the drawn-out confirmation process is producing rising vacancies on the federal bench placing the nation's "judiciary on a dangerous course, as the Department of Justice projects that fully half of the Federal judiciary will be vacant by 2020 if we continue on the current pace of judicial confirmations," the president wrote.
He continued:
The real harm of this political game-playing falls on the American people, who turn to the courts for justice. By denying these nominations a simple up-or-down vote, the Republican leadership is undermining the ability of our courts to deliver justice those in need.
As he did during a recent speech before the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, Obama highlighted his selection of Judge Albert Diaz to the U.S. Court of Apples for the Fourth Circuit. Although the Senate judiciary committee has approved the nomination of Diaz, he has "waited 245 days for an up-or-down vote - more than 8 months," the president wrote.
The president's entire letter is available here. Justices Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Attorney General Eric Holder, and a group of former federal court judges have also joined in urging the Senate to stop holding up judicial nominations.
To keep track of the vacancies on the federal bench and the status of the president's nominations, visit the ACS web-based project JudicialNominations.org and get updates from Facebook.
[image via The White House]
Gerontocracy by filibuster and a sclerotic Supreme Court
We need legislation and confirmations in the Senate, not obstruction. We need a Supreme Court that maintains its independence, but gets some turnover so that a majority does not go way out of step with the voters for a generation. Solution? Consider the following Constitutional amendment:
AMENDMENT TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION
Section 1. No rule or action of the Senate shall require unanimous consent or a supermajority, except as provided in Article I, sections 3, 5 and 7, Article II, section 2, Article V, Amendment 12, Amendment 14 and Amendment 25.
Section 2. On June 30 of each odd-numbered year, if no vacancy in the Supreme Court shall have occurred since July 1 of the preceding odd-numbered year, the longest serving chief or associate justice of the Supreme Court, having served as a justice not less than fifteen years, shall become a senior justice. Senior justices shall sit by designation on the inferior courts of the United States, and on the Supreme Court by designation at random in cases of recusal. No person less than fifty years of age shall be confirmed as a justice, and no person, having served as a justice for five years, shall hold any other office of the United States or serve as a member of the House of Representatives or Senate or as the governor of any state.
Judicial Obstruction and Obama
I remember clearly the nomination of Robert Bork, a man so learned, so completely above reproach that we have had no one to equal him to sit on the bench since. The Democrats led a scurrilous and utterly unjustified smear campaign against this good man. Those who took part in this persecution will answer one day for their part in it. Let no one say that leftists lack audacity. For this charlatan, Obama, to speak out loud about obstructionism is the height of deliberate deceit from the master of lies himself. Why doesn't he address his own obstructionism and RELEASE HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE? This fraud will be exposed soon and then the rats will need to run for cover; many of them will be scurrying from this very organization
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