The era of constant fights between Republicans and Democrats over President Obama’s judicial nominations may suddenly be over.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said last week that he was putting the kibosh on most of Obama’s federal court nominees, and said the Senate would only keep working on district court nominees that enjoy the support of GOP senators.
In years past, GOP talk about objecting to nominations was enough to start a bitter political war that ended in Senate Democrats changing the rules to let those nominees slide through more easily, without needing a single vote from Republicans.
This time around, with Republicans now in control of the Senate, judicial activists on the left were unusually quiet as they reacted to McConnell. And some of the reason might be because Democrats were already able to move some of the most controversial nominees through the Senate, with the help of the so-called nuclear option.
One activist told the Washington Examiner that the Democrats’ move to end filibusters on nominees dramatically boosted Obama’s appointments to the federal bench, well ahead of George W. Bush’s total appointments at the six-and-half year mark. That is leaving far fewer pitched battles for left-leaning judicial activists to fight.
That activist added that most of the interest groups who normally fight for Obama’s judicial appointments are busy watching the Supreme Court for the King v. Burwell decision that could unravel Obama’s health care law.
The few battles that remain will take place at the circuit court level, but the Senate has recently taken action on two nominations that had previously stalled, quelling some concerns on the left.
Earlier this year, Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., who faces a tough re-election fight next year, was dragging his heels on declaring public support for Luis Felipe Restrepo, the president’s choice to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which has jurisdiction over district courts in Delaware New Jersey and all of Pennsylvania.
But in May Toomey issued a blue-slip — a formal sign of support for Restrepo — and Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has scheduled a confirmation hearing for Restrepo this Wednesday.
The Judiciary Committee also unanimously approved the appointment of Kara Stoll to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and her nomination should soon move to the Senate floor.
While the fight may be dying down, there was still some worry on the left about McConnell’s comments. Defenders of Wildlife senior attorney Glenn Sugameli highlighted the comments in his blog Judging the Environment, and People For the American Way, a liberal civil rights group, posted a story saying the comments could signal “a dramatic escalation of the GOP’s partisan war” against Democratic presidents’ efforts to fill the court with judges of their choosing.
“It would make the 114th Congress the first and only one since the creation of the modern circuit court system in the 1890s not to confirm any circuit court judges,” the group’s Paul Gordon wrote.
“So after the headlines of the past few days, the eyes of the country are on McConnell,” he wrote, “waiting to see if he will cater to the rabidly anti-Obama base and prevent votes on any circuit court nominees, or whether he will — as his spokesperson suggested, govern more responsibly.”
But McConnell’s spokesman over the weekend tried to clarify that there is no shutdown, and said the president will likely win another appellate confirmation before leaving office.
That seemed to take some of the sting out of McConnell’s statement for the left, and his pledge to seek candidates favored by the GOP is helping him on the right. His statement bodes well for a slate of appointments that have strong home-state support from Republicans such as Alabama Sens. Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, as well as Indiana Sen. Dan Coats and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson.
