Republicans should be using the government shutdown as an opportunity to advance judicial nominees — a rare thing that can do without the House and with a bare majority.
The Trump administration should have already renominated all the judicial and executive nominees who ended the 115th Congress in limbo.
This would have allowed the committees to begin consideration of nominees last week. Instead, everybody is twiddling their thumbs while Trump and Democratic leaders trade jibes about the border wall. Why not use the time constructively?
As the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial last week, 391 of Trump’s nominees failed to receive confirmation votes in the last Congress. Of those, 71 were judicial nominees: 59 to district courts, 12 to appeals courts. Of those, 31 already were approved by the Judiciary Committee. Surely, the Senate could already be working on one or two of these whose nominations have languished for six months or more.
The wait time for some executive branch nominees has been even longer. Consider the superbly qualified Cully Stimson, whom Trump nominated way back in June of 2017 to be general counsel for the Navy. There’s no reason to keep the Navy without its top legal post filled or to keep Capt. Stimson in limbo. And, because the Defense Department already has been funded, Stimson could start right away, free from any shutdown anxiety.
The political reality is that with Democrats controlling the House, the Republican Senate isn’t likely to see much hope anytime soon for legislative achievement. It should therefore work virtually around the clock to advance nominations, a task that requires no House action whatsoever.
Every day that goes by before starting this process is an extra day in which key cases can be assigned to liberal federal judges rather than to newly confirmed conservatives. For the parties to those cases, the different could be huge.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: The original version of this piece overstated the power of the Senate to advance nominees without prior White House action or committee action and thus placed undue blame on Senate Republicans for the inaction. This article has been accordingly revised. The Washington Examiner apologizes to our readers.
