Peter Keisler is one of the most accomplished constitutional lawyers in the United States.
A former Yale Law Journal editor, law clerk on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for D.C. and at the Supreme Court, and the acting attorney general of the United States in 2007, Keisler is by all accounts a brilliant scholar-litigator of impeccable judgment.
A moderate conservative, his credentials for a judgeship at the same D.C. Court of Appeals are so strong that even the left-leaning editorial boards of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have strongly supported his nomination. The American Bar Association review committee, hardly a rubber stamp for conservatives, gave Keisler its highest rating. Unanimously
Yet Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont refuses — without explanation — to allow the panel to vote on Keisler’s nomination. His nomination has been pending an astonishing 623 days — more than 10 times as long as Leahy once said was a reasonable expectation — in a form of perpetual limbo.
Leahy and his fellow Democrats are blocking Keisler with raw political power, just because they can, as a way to thumb their noses at President Bush.
Forget justice for Keisler. Forget justice for the other judges on the D.C. Circuit who are forced to cover the extra workload. And forget justice for all the litigants, ordinary citizens, who have to wait extra time for their cases to be heard.
And Keisler is just one of 10 appeals court nominees similarly blocked, without even a committee vote, by Leahy and his Senate allies. On Feb. 29, Judiciary Committee ranking minority member Arlen Specter, R-Pa., wrote to Leahy complaining about Senate Democrats’ unfair obstructionism.
“The essence of the situation,” wrote Specter, “is that 15 circuit judges and 57 district court judges were confirmed [under Republican leadership] in the last two years of President Clinton’s administration, compared to 6 circuit court and 34 district court judges for President Bush in 2007-2008.” By this time in the Clinton term, 10 circuit court nominees had been afforded hearings, compared to only five Bush nominees.
Of local interest in the D.C. area, Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School with a circuit court clerkship and Department of Justice service to his credit, remains blocked without a hearing — and without any better explanation than that Maryland’s two Democratic senators think he is such a fine U.S. attorney that they hate to see him promoted out of their jurisdiction.
Yet the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to which he is nominated, is so short of judges that it has been officially declared a “judicial emergency.” Just 10 active judges now sit on what is supposed to be a 15-member court, and the seat for which Rosenstein is nominated has been empty since August 31 of 2000 — yes, almost eight years.
Leahy answered Specter’s complaints with disingenuous mumbo jumbo. For example, he wrote that as chairman of the committee, his record of moving judicial confirmations compares favorably to Specter’s record when Republicans were in charge.
But it was not sloth by Specter that caused the backlog, but the Democratic filibusters, threats of filibusters and related measures. Those filibusters were arguably unconstitutional, and definitely unprecedented: In the previous 214 years of this country’s existence, not a single judicial nominee had been blocked by a permanent filibuster.
Worse, the Democratic blocking maneuvers often have been accompanied by smear campaigns against the nominees. Thus was Mississippi’s Charles Pickering, a man who braved KKK death threats while working for racial conciliation decades ago, described by Democratic committee members as little short of a raving racist. Thus was D.C.-based Miguel Estrada, a superbly qualified native of Honduras, painted (bizarrely) as somebody who hated his own ethnicity.
“It is not just a matter of statistics,” Specter said on the Senate floor. “It is a matter of very substantial impact on the public, a very substantial impact on the courts, and a matter of very significant unfairness to the nominees themselves. … The adage is well-established in our lexicon that justice delayed is justice denied.”
Leahy and his cohorts are responsible for the injustice. The American people are the ones suffering from it.
Quin Hillyer is associate editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner.He can be reached at [email protected].
