A combination of payback and partisanship is causing judicial appointments by President Barack Obama to pile up in the U.S. Senate, where Republicans are either stalling or refusing to confirm nominees for the federal bench.

 

In fact, President Obama is on pace currently to have the fewest judicial appointments confirmed during the first two years of a presidency since Richard Nixon.

 

The Associated Press reports that fewer than half of Obama’s nominees have been confirmed and 102 out of 854 judgeships are vacant.  

 

“What’s interesting is you got a guy (Bush) who was barely elected president with a Senate in the hands of the opposing party, and he is going to come out better in his first two years than a guy who got elected with a big majority and had a big majority in the Senate too,” Brookings Institution scholar Russell Wheeler told the Associated Press.

 

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has said the GOP opposition to Obama’s judicial selections is partly revenge for Democrats’ blocking some Bush appointees. However, McConnell’s spokesman, Don Stewart, put the blame on the White House for sending so few nominations to the Senate for confirmation.

 

Judith Schaeffer, vice president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, has criticized Senate Republicans for taking “judicial obstructionism to an entirely new level, abusing the Senate’s procedural rules to block even the most uncontroversial of the President’s judicial nominees and giving new meaning to the phrase ‘Just Say No.’”

 

She added: “This rank, hyper-partisanship diminishes the ability of our federal courts to dispense justice fairly and timely, and should concern every American, no matter his or her political leanings.”

 

Even some Republican senators have complained, such as Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who called on his GOP colleagues in July to vote on the nomination of Nashville attorney Jane Stranch, whom Obama proposed in August 2009 and whom Alexander and fellow Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker support. But McConnell put a hold on Stranch along with the others, although he has reluctantly agreed to give her a vote later this month.

 

When George W. Bush left the White House, 60% of all federal judges had been appointed by Republican presidents. Twenty months into the Obama presidency, that number has dropped…to 59%.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Obama Getting Fewer Judges Seated Than Nixon (by Mark Sherman, Associated Press)

Kimberly Mueller: A Poster Child for Republican Obstruction of Judicial Nominees (by Judith Schaeffer, Constitutional Accountability Center)