Justice delayed is justice denied. Senate Democrats are denying one heck of a lot of justice for the people of North Carolina. Senate Republicans, on the other hand, are proposing a plan to ensure more timely justice no matter which party would benefit.
As highlighted earlier this week by a most informative forum on judicial nominations sponsored by the Senate Republican Conference, U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad of North Carolina on Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of his nomination to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, without the courtesy of a single committee hearing to consider his qualifications.
Not only is the unconscionable delay unfair to Judge Conrad and his family, and not only does it deny justice to North Carolinians, but it also harms Virginians, Marylanders and South Carolinians as well.
Those are the four states that make up the Fourth Circuit, and right now four of the 15 spots on the Fourth Circuit bench are empty. What’s worse is that North Carolina by population should be allotted four of those 15 seats, but instead only one North Carolina-based judge sits on that bench.
So all sorts of cases drag on, without resolution, well beyond reason. Indeed, the Fourth Circuit is so shorthanded that it is officially listed as a “judicial emergency.” This affects not just the cost and time frame for appeals, but also backs up the federal district courts as well.
In order to meet its workload, the Fourth Circuit has been forced to “borrow” district court judges to hear appellate cases — a level of review for which they haven’t been confirmed — thus taking time away from their own work hearing hundreds of ordinary citizens’ cases.
The delay in filling the seat has little to do with any controversy or ideological dispute about Judge Conrad. Just three years ago, Conrad was approved for the district court without objection from a single senator. Earlier in his career, Clintonite Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Conrad to head an important campaign finance investigation, and Reno praised his work.
The American Bar Association review committee unanimously gave Conrad its highest rating. And David Bohm, assistant executive director of the North Carolina Bar Association, spoke at Monday’s forum at the behest of his organization to report that “the support for his nomination among lawyers who practice in Judge Conrad’s court is deep, broad, and bipartisan.”
Against all this, Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., explained his intransigence merely by citing earlier disputes over the same bench seat dating back nearly into the 1990s.
To which Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, rightly noted that his own daughters “have understood … from the time they reached kindergarten” that “she started it” arguments were “never good enough” to be reasonable excuses for bad behavior.
At the same forum, Northwestern Law professor John McGinnis proposed what ought to be an obvious solution, one that favors no particular party. Noting that “refusals to hold hearings are not in the public interest, because they make the confirmation process less transparent and democratic,” McGinnis proposed that the Judiciary Committee “adopt a rule that says that there will be a timeline — perhaps six months, perhaps less than that — requiring a hearing on any nominee. … And after that, I think there should be, within one month, a vote required.”
Actually, ranking Judiciary Committee Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who has a long history of supporting Democratic judicial nominees, has been pushing a similar idea since April 1, 2004.
Specter proposes a “protocol” requiring a hearing within 30 days after the Senate receives a nomination, a vote by the committee within 30 days after that and a vote by the full Senate within another 30 days — unless the Senate leaders of both parties mutually agree that extraordinary circumstances require more time.
Such a rule, no matter which party controls the presidency or which controls the Senate, would be politically neutral, and thus scrupulously fair. And it would mean qualified nominees like Robert Conrad wouldn’t be forced to put their professional lives on hold while enduring petty political disputes. Most importantly, justice for the citizens of the states affected would no longer be delayed, but instead would be well served.
