Tag Archives: judicial nominees

Slowly Getting Judicial Confirmations Done

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On July 10th, The New York Post posted an article about Whitney Hermandorfer, the first of President Trump’s judicial appointments to be confirmed this term.

The article reports:

The Senate on Thursday cleared the way to confirm the first judicial appointment of President Trump’s second term, marking a slower tempo than at the same point of both his first term and that of President Joe Biden’s.

By a 51-43 party-line vote, the Senate moved to conclude debate on Whitney Hermandorfer’s nod for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, teeing up an expected vote next week.

At this stage of Trump’s first term, the Senate had already confirmed two court nominees — Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Sixth Circuit Judge Amul Thapar.

By next week, that figure will shoot up to three, including US District of Idaho Judge David Nye, who was confirmed in July of 2017.

Meanwhile, former President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats had already wrangled through 14 judges at this stage of 2021.

The Democrats have decided to fight President Trump’s agenda through the courts and are probably going to drag their feet in confirming the President’s judicial nominees. This is one of many reasons that the Republicans need to gain Congressional seats in the mid-term elections.

The article notes:

In the past, confirmations used to be more cumbersome because they had to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to break a filibuster from the minority party. In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used the nuclear option to eliminate that in most instances.

Republicans won back the Senate the following year.

Reconfiguring the ideological composition of the judiciary has been a key goal of administrations from both political parties. But the GOP-led Senate has been busy with other priorities as well.

Harry Reid was warned that using the nuclear option would come back to bite him in the future. It did. The Democrats were so used to being in the majority that they couldn’t envision losing that majority.

Chris Wallace Must Be Getting Heat For His Debate Performance

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Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article about an interview on ” Fox News Sunday.” Chris Wallace, who hosts the show, was conducting an interview of Democratic Delaware Sen. Chris Coons.

The article reports:

Wallace specifically asked Coons to weigh in on the idea of adding justices to the Supreme Court, and the Delaware Senator pivoted to argue that the Trump administration’s focus on filling judicial vacancies amounted to court packing.

For once, Chris Wallace got it right. The article notes:

“Let me just say — I’m just going to say, that’s a different issue than packing the court,” Wallace concluded. “If that’s the question, whether or not the court should — the Senate should vote to confirm Barrett, that’s different than changing the number of justices on the court. Senator Coons, I got to leave it there, thank you.”

For the record, packing the court means adding more justices to the Supreme Court in order to impact the balance of liberal and conservative judges. Filling judicial vacancies is one of the responsibilities of the President. Because of the increasing rancor in the Senate, a large number of the nominees of President Obama were not confirmed, and there were a lot of judicial vacancies when President Trump took office. He promptly began to fill these vacancies. Getting judicial nominees passed is much easier when the President and the Senate are held by the same party. Our Founding Fathers did not intend for that to be the case (they disliked the idea of political parties), but that is where we are today.

I give credit to Chris Wallace for at least correcting Senator Coons on his talking point.