A push by the co-founder of a leading right-leaning legal group helping President Trump fill federal courts has outraged like-minded judges, prompting one judge to say the co-founder should “stop pulling imaginary stuff from his butt.”
Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi, a Northwestern law professor, published a paper detailing his desire for new legislation to help Trump fill the courts with judges to overcome those appointed by former President Barack Obama. His proposal includes abolishing 158 administrative law judges, who preside over administrative hearings within federal agencies, and replacing them with federal district court judges.
“The federal judiciary is long overdue for new judgeships given how much caseloads have grown since 1990, when the last omnibus judgeship bill was passed,” Calabresi wrote in the paper published earlier this month. “Moreover, Congress could expedite the creation of new judgeships by abolishing 158 powerful [administrative law judges] and replacing them with Article III district court judges that would help to alleviate the caseload burden of afflicting judicial districts across the country. In doing so, Congress would extinguish serious separation of power problems that [administrative law judges] pose, and also help to undo the damage done to the rule of law by President Obama’s lower federal court appointments over the past eight years.”
Senior District Judge Richard G. Kopf slammed the proposal as “utter nonsense” that “pisses me off.” Kopf was appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
“In short, professor Steven G. Calabresi should stop pulling imaginary stuff from his butt and impugning the integrity of federal judges in the process,” Kopf wrote at Simple Justice. “He doesn’t understand what truly motivates federal judges.”
Trump Supreme Court short-list candidate William Pryor, an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals judge, responded to Calabresi’s proposal in the New York Times that it “makes no sense to expand lower federal courts to serve a political agenda.”
“If judges were overworked and cutting corners, they would undoubtedly ask Congress for more help beyond filling vacancies and the addition of a modest number of judgeships requested annually,” Pryor wrote in the piece published Wednesday. “If federal courts were suffering a caseload crisis, there would be nothing attractive about being a federal judge, and judges would be departing in droves. And they’re not.”
Pryor blasted Calabresi’s proposal for “lack[ing] common sense” and argued that “there is nothing conservative — or otherwise meritorious — about this proposal.”
Kopf also took issue with Calabresi’s suggestion that the Judicial Conference “suffers from a severe bias, which causes it not to ask for the creation of as many new judgeships as the nation needs.”
The Judicial Conference is a national policy-making body for the federal courts. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts picked Judge Merrick Garland, Obama’s failed nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, to lead the Judicial Conference’s Executive Committee last month.
