Legal News

Here Come the Obama Judges!

By Ashby Jones

The explanations for why the Obama administration has moved slowly on the appointment of federal judges are fairly consistent: Mostly, the thinking goes, the president has had his eye on more pressing matters: the economy, health care, Afghanistan.

But now, it seems, the time has come. The White House has in the past two months, stepped up the pace of nominations in a big way, reports the National Law Journal. The president has nominated 15 district court judges in the past two months, as many as he nominated in the first 11 months of his term.

But just that Obama has stepped it up on judges doesn’t mean that an equal number of confirmations will just roll right in. Senate Republicans, it seems, have started employing an interesting tactic to delay confirmation of Obama judges, reports the NLJ’s David Ingram. Ingram describes it this way:

A nominee for a federal judgeship lingers for months without a confirmation vote, held up by an anonymous objection, but, when the roll is eventually called, not a single senator votes against the nominee.

Long waits, followed by unanimous confirmation.

So far, the situation has played out far differently than it did in past administrations. Democrats, for instance, held up many of President George W. Bush’s nominees with noisy debates on the Senate floor, and Bush rebuked the senators in speeches.

This time around, however “Republicans have been putting holds on the nominations, and the Senate leadership has said, ‘We’re not ready to take that on yet,’ ” said Brookings’s Russell Wheeler to the NLJ.

But, writes Ingram, with more nominees awaiting Senate action, one White House official said obstruction by Republicans will become more visible.

“As there are more in the pipeline and it’s looking more and more clogged,” the official said, “public attention will be more focused on the slowness of floor action.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 17, 2010 (boomark / email).