The current “vacancy crisis” is very much the handiwork of Senate Republicans during their majority in the Senate. Senate Judiciary Committee members routinely refused to allow Clinton nominations for virtually anything come to a floor vote. This situation became so ludicrously bad that Chief Justice Rehnquist (who is extremely reluctant to say anything at all which might be construed as “an attempt to influence the political process”) actually testified before the committee on how the failure of the committee to allow judicial nominees to a floor vote was hampering the administration of justice and the operation of the federal courts. The Republican Senate majority, however, ignored the nation’s highest jurist’s exhortation to simply allow the appointments to be voted up or down and instead elected to continue to stall virtually all judicial nominations all the way to the end of Clinton’s term. (The Senate Judiciary Committee also used this approach to stall appointments to various cabinet positions, leading to Clinton using the recess appointment power to appoint Bill Lann Lee to a post the Department of Justice, which ticked off a lot of Republicans.) Trying to blame Clinton for this is misplaced; the blame clearly lies with Senate Republicans.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, before their President could make a significant number of appointments of his own, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. The Democrats are now in control, and they have little incentive to do anything but continue the practice the Republicans made “politics as usual” when they were in power. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. The Republican Party can stuff itself. As usual, the Republicans want to have their cake and eat yours too.
I am shocked, sir, shocked that base considerations of pay back politics could be involved in the Committee’s rejection of Judge Pickering’s nomination to the Circuit Court for the downhill end of the Mississippi Valley. Who would think that such considerations would come into play in view of the even handed and impartial treatment the last administration’s nominees to this bench received at the hand of the then Senate Committee.
Come on, get real. The ideologists of both parties are engaged in an epic struggle to put their people in control of the federal courts. The process has little to do with the objective qualifications and fitness of the candidates and every thing to do with rewarding constituent groups. Nobody associated with the leading lights of the minority party in the senate is going to be appointed to a position where they get to control the administration of civil and criminal justice in controversial cases for the rest of their life. As bad a deal as Judge Pickering might have gotten, it is no worse than Clinton’s nominees received at the hands of the Senate Committee when it was dominated by the GOP. This guy is not Oliver Wendell Holmes, or Alfred Hughes or Louis Brandies. He isn’t even Gus or Learned Hand. Western Civilization will survive if this guy stays on the District bench.
Give it a rest. There will be plenty more horrors for the boys from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page to blather about.
I am shocked, sir, shocked that base considerations of pay back politics could be involved in the Committee’s rejection of Judge Pickering’s nomination to the Circuit Court for the downhill end of the Mississippi Valley. Who would think that such considerations would come into play in view of the even handed and impartial treatment the last administration’s nominees to this bench received at the hand of the then Senate Committee.
Come on, get real. The ideologists of both parties are engaged in an epic struggle to put their people in control of the federal courts. The process has little to do with the objective qualifications and fitness of the candidates and every thing to do with rewarding constituent groups. Nobody associated with the leading lights of the minority party in the senate is going to be appointed to a position where they get to control the administration of civil and criminal justice in controversial cases for the rest of their life. As bad a deal as Judge Pickering got it is no worse than Clinton’s nominees received at the hands of the Senate Committee when it was dominated by the GOP. This guy is not Oliver Wendell Holmes, or Alfred Hughes or Louis Brandies. He isn’t even Gus or Learned Hand. Western Civilization will survive if this guy stays on the District bench.
Give it a rest. There will be plenty more horrors for the boys from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page to blather about.
I think the preferred method of nominating justices is to work up a list of maybe 5 candidates. Then feel out the Senate as to their acceptability.
The appointer has to play this one close to the vest with no more than one executive dept. aide in on the list. That way if there is a leak, the leaker is known and can be flogged with a cat-o-nine tails.
I suspect that presidents who were successful in getting appointees through with a minimum of fuss must have used this method or some variation of it.
It is quite true that nominations to courts are controversial and always have been. And more than a few presidents have been greatly surprised by the behavior of their appointees once seated on the bench.
Such controversy isn’t something that was invented recently by Tom Daschle to discomfit GW.
Pardon the brief hijack, but those of us attending law school at the University of Kentucky have been interested onlookers concerning David Bunning’s nomination to the federal bench. Those of us in my social circle who are Democrats (myself included) were rather amused by the nomination, considering the fact that his father is our junior United States Senator. My friends, Democrat and Republican alike, agree that his middle of the road class rank hasn’t helped his chances much. No one I know at school has ever clerked for Mr. Bunning at the U.S. Attorney’s office or come into contact with him in a professional context, so I can’t even give second-hand comments about his academic credentials. However, I can say that my buddies and I were all greatly insulted that the ABA attacked him because he received his undergraduate degree and J.D. at UK. UK is not known as being a stellar undergraduate institution (and rightly so), but we have a very good law school. We’re not Harvard or Yale, but we’ve been ranked in the top 25% of all law schools in the United States by at least one publication this year (U.S. News & World Report). Our building may be a bit old and run down, but our faculty is excellent, and it was pretty damn good when Bunning was here in the 1980s. To give an example, of my four professors this semester, one of them finished first in his class at Harvard Law School and another clerked for David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. Although a good number of us don’t support Bunning’s nomination, everyone I’ve talked to is upset with the ABA.
Moving beyond the hijack, I’m concerned that the Judiciary Committee’s refusal to send Pickering’s nomination to the Senate for a vote may not bode well for John Rogers, a nominee for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals who happens to be the faculty adviser for the conservative Federalist Society here at UK. Hopefully not every one of Bush’s nominations will result in a drawn-out political fight, because many of the federal circuits (the Sixth included) are short judges. I don’t agree with a good portion of Bush’s politics, but I hate the thought of placing the federal judiciary in limbo.
Blocking judicial nominees is certainly a game both sides play. And it’s a pretty obnoxious one because they have to play so many word games to get away with it. Both sides have litmus tests, and both sides claim they don’t. Both sides try to block nominees close to an election on the hope that their guy will win and be able to fill those vacancies.
But this is a little different. The Democrats are taking this stonewalling to a new level. I was just watching The Capital Gang, and it was pointed out that in the first two years of every presidency since Nixon over 90% of the presidents judicial nominees were confirmed. That includes Clinton’s.
But Bush has had only 24% of his nominees confirmed, and there is a real vacancy crisis happening, as I understand it.
Until Sept. 11, the Democrats were also holding up Bush appointees to various embassies. The war seems to have sped that up, though.
With Pickering, the Democrats have been playing a two-faced game where they slam him for supposed racial slights while exclaiming that they are not calling him a racist. They will say things like, “His record on race is troubling”, and then when called on it they’ll say, “we never accused him of being a racist! We just question the decisions.” That sort of thing.
A lot of analysts feelt that what this is is a ‘shot across the bow’ against Bush’s potential Supreme Court nominees. There are at least two SC judges that may retire soon, and the Democrats are trying to send a message that a conservative will simply not be allowed, in hopes that it will force Bush to nominate a moderate. That seems like a plausible scenario.
This is just hardball politics. You guys on both sides of the aisle should stop playing the game and just admit it. You have a government comprised of parties that will destroy anyone they need to in order to gain an advantage.
It is a little disengenuous to bring up percentages to equate the first year then assert that all the parties acted the same towards the end of the term without evidence. The facts do not agree with your assertion that Reagan/Bush got the same treatment at the end of their terms.
Not only were appointments stalled but there were almost no new seats created. The combination of those factors left a considerably larger number of vacancies for Bush to fill than any other president making the comparison of first year figures less relevant. Clinton also made an effort throughout his term to appoint moderate judges and his appointees had the lowest rate of previous political activism of any recent president which further diminishes the importance of your comparison.
It is hardball politics but the goal is a bit more socially relevant than ripping apart the other party.
And I hope you’re willing to admit that both sides truly believe that, and truly believe that they are on the side of goodness. That’s why politics DO get so ugly - because people really believe that they are on the right side, and fight all the harder to protect it.
I’m not going to get into a deconstruction of just why Bush has had so few appointments get through. I will point out that the Democrats controlled both houses during the first two years of every one of those White Houses. So it’s not a Democrat/Republican thing. If you want my opinion, it’s a reflection of the fact that politics has gotten a lot more vicious in the last 8 years. And frankly, I’m willing to put the lion’s share of the blame for that on the Republicans, but both sides willingly engage in it now and it’s been getting more and more vicious. If a Democrat had been elected and the Republicans were in control of the Senate I fully expect that they would do exactly the same thing.
I certainly agree that both sides think they are doing the right thing.
I am not sure that republicans wouldn’t be worse. They don’t seem to pay the same political price for playing hard ball in most cases.
Democrats don’t seem to be as good at it and tend to agonize over it then screw it up with a disjointed approach like in Bork, Thomas and now Pickering. Democrats I talk to were not at all confident that Daschle’s senate would stand in the way of Bush’s judicial agenda and remain unsure that they have the spine to stick it out and force a compromise.
Not really all that surprising. During the first two years of the Clinton’s administration, the Democrats controlled the Senate. It wasn’t until 1995, the third year of Clinton’s presidency, that the Republicans took control of the Senate, and the judicial logjam begin. Please note that in 1989, when Bush I was in the White House and the Democrats controlled the Senate, the Senate Judicial Committee wasn’t refusing to vote on judicial candidates. This practice dates only as far back as the Republican majority beginning in 1995.
I would question the motives of whoever offered this particular “factoid”, as it clearly appears to be an attempt to paint the Democratic Senate majority as being unduly mean to the present administration, when in fact they’re just doing to this administration what the previous Republican Senate made business as usual when it was in control. The way the factoid was expressed seems to be suggesting that a new President is entitled to a “grace period”, even though you can be quite certain that Clinton would not have received such a “grace period” had the Republicans controlled the Senate in 1993.
Hmmm, this is what you get when politics enters the judicial arena, pressure groups and other self interested parties.
I really think that politicians are not the best people to appoint the judiciary at all, the judiciary’s role should be solely to excercise the letter of the law as enacted by politicians.
The judiciary should only be appointed on the basis of proffessional skills, and this should be done by their peers whose deliberations should be a matter of public record.
In the UK we are partway there, politicians do not get involved in the appointments, but the selection boards are not open to scrutiny, even so I still think this is better than having some hick appointed on the basis of debts owing, and yes I do gather that many US states do require a certain minimum standard, but some of those standards are either not particularly high, or even when meeting very high standards they do not get their bench because of the issue of the day.
I share the feeling that we need more moderate judges, especially for appointments to the Supreme Court. I understand all the politics involved and have enjoyed the debate on this thread.
What I object to is the fact that Pickering was done in because he was from Mississippi. It is easy to just assume that especially at his age, he has some racially dirty laundry. The racial tag being placed on a white person from Mississippi is next to impossible to erase, no matter what the evidence shows. I guess I’m saying that as a moderate I agree with the end, but don’t like the means.