U.S. Senate

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."