judicial nominations

The GOP-controlled Senate is confirming federal judges at the slowest rate in 60 years, The Huffington Post's Jennifer Bendery reports. The second-slowest year was in 1953 when the Senate only confirmed a total of nine judges. The Alliance for Justice, a left-leaning group, released a report last week presenting that analysis.

Only six of President Barack Obama's judicial nominations have been voted on by senators in 2015, while 29 of President George W. Bush's nominations were confirmed by this point of his seventh year in office, Bendery reports.

Lawyer Donald Scarinci, opining on the PolitickerNJ site, writes that the 2016 presidential race is really about which party will be in power to appoint a new Supreme Court Justice. But he notes, with the current polarization of politics, that the next president won't be able to select an ideological twin for the court. "Like those before them, the ultimate nominee will likely be an excellent jurist whose views on significant constitutional issues tend to stay in the middle of the road," Scarinci opines.

The legacy that President Barack Obama could leave on the federal judiciary could be diminished because the Republican party is blocking dozens of his court picks, Politico's Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim report: "Democrats believe the GOP is creating an unprecedented expansion of the Thurmond Rule, which holds that the Senate shuts off the confirmation valve of lifetime judicial appointments in July of an election year."

The GOP-controlled Senate is on track this year to confirm the fewest federal judges since 1969, and more than two dozen federal courts have declared emergencies because of excessive caseloads caused by vacancies. Nominations for judges for the home states of Republican senators, however, are moving on the Senate floor.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says the President Obama's nominees to serve on the circuit courts of appeal won't be confirmed anymore, The Huffington Post's Jen Bendery reports. McConnell said on a conservative radio show that "'so far, the only judges we’ve confirmed have been federal district judges that have been signed off on by Republican senators,” and he expects that to be the case through 2016.

However, Luis Felipe Restrepo, a nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, has had a hearing scheduled before the Judiciary Committee, and he has the support of Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. Kara Stoll, a nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, also has been voted out of the Judiciary Committee.

The New York Times Jeremy W. Peters reports that Democrats have reversed the partisan imbalance on federal appellate courts from one that favored conservatives: "For the first time in more than a decade, judges appointed by Democratic presidents considerably outnumber judges appointed by Republican presidents. The Democrats’ advantage has only grown since late last year when they stripped Republicans of their ability to filibuster the president’s nominees." Democratic appointees hold a majority of seats on nine out of the 13 Courts of Appeals, Peters adds.

With Robert Wilkins' confirmation to the D.C. Circuit by the U.S.. Senate, President Obama's overhaul of "the country's second most powerful court" is complete, the Associated Press reports. Now there is a 7-4 majority in favor of the Democracts on the court that hears appeals of federal rules and regulations.

The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports that Senate Republicans can still block some  of President Obama's judicial nominees despite the elimination of filibusters for most such nominations. Obama's nominees to federal appellate courts can still be blocked because "it left unchanged the Senate’s 'blue slip' custom, which allows senators to block nominees to judgeships associated with their states," Savage reports. The rule change will really only benefit appellate nominees for the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler told Savage.        

New York University law professor Burt Neuborne thinks it's a good thing that the U.S. Senate has decided to go nuclear on the filibuster, The Wall Street Journal reports. It's not because Neuborne wants to see more of President Obama's judicial nominees on the bench. It's because he thinks having "the modern filibuster morphed into a de facto super-majority voting rule" made the votes cast by senators mathematically unequal in violation of "'Article V, and the one‐Senator one‐vote principle of the Seventeenth Amendment,"' The Journal further reports.

Lawyer Adam White writes in the Des Moines Register that federal judicial nominees aren't entitled to get a vote in the Senate. This has been a Democratic-party complaint after Republican senators once again blocked some of President Obama's judicial nominees. White points out, however, that the federal constitution doesn't require action by the Senate on judical nominees. "So if the Senate does not 'owe' all judicial nominations an up-or-down majority vote, then how does the Constitution resolve disputes between the president and the Senate over the Senate’s failure to vote on nominations?" White asks. "Simply put, the Constitution doesn’t resolve those disputes."

Diane J. Humetewa, a Hopi citizen, the first American Indian to serve as a United States attorney, and who has been an appellate court judge for the Hopi Tribe Appellate Court, was nominated this week by President Barack Obama for a federal judgeship on the U.S. District Court for Arizona. If confirmed, Humetewa would be the first American Indian woman and only the third American Indian overall to serve in the federal judiciary, according to Indian Country Today Media Network. "Indian affairs experts had been pressuring the president to make another Native American federal judgeship appointment – several more, in fact – citing the large number of Indian law cases heard in federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court's tendency not to understand tribal law," Indian Country Today further reports.