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Last week, Jacquelyn Nguyen became the first Vietnamese-American judge to be confirmed by the US Senate for the Federal judiciary. That's a salutatory achievement to be sure, but it was made all the more remarkable by the fact that Nguyen is only the 11th of Pres. Obama's judicial nominees to win Senate confirmation.
In fact, Pres. Obama is poised to have the lowest number of confirmed judicial appointments of any new president in recent memory, as the first chart below indicates. Democrats blame Republican Senators for needlessly delaying the process. Republicans deny that charge and say the Obama administration hasn't submitted enough nominations, and besides, the Democrats blocked a number of conservative judicial nominees during the Bush administration.
Either way, it means that dozens of judicial vacancies are going unfilled. According to a chart on the Federal Courts website, there are currently 19 vacancies on the US Court of Appeals and 77 vacancies at the District Court level. Of these, nine nominees are pending at the Appeals Court level and six District Court nominees are awaiting confirmation.
On top of everything else, the confirmation process is taking an inordinately long time. For example, Judge Nguyen was hardly a controversial nominee. She was ultimately confirmed on a vote of 97-0. Despite that, it took 123 days for her nomination to move through the confirmation process, according to a tally compiled by the Jaded JD.
Of course, Nguyen's process was speedy compared to the 247-day slog that resulted in the confirmation of Judge David Hamilton for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Despite the fact that Hamilton had the enthusiastic endorsement of his home state senators, Democrat Evan Bayh and Republican Richard Lugar, as well as a "unanimously well-qualified" rating from the American Bar Association, Judiciary Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions vociferously objected to his confirmation. Sessions unsuccessfully tried to filibuster. In a letter posted to his website, Sessions accused Hamilton of using his prior position as a district court judge "to drive a political agenda." Sessions and other Republican detractors had blocked a vote on Hamilton's nomination for several months, according to a Nov. 18 story in the Chicago Tribune.
Sessions' Revenge?
However, some observers think Sessions' behavior may have a more personal motivation.
In 1986, Sessions was nominated for a Federal judgeship by Pres. Reagan, but he was rejected after witnesses at his confirmation hearings disclosed statements he had made that seemed racist, including comments supportive of the Ku Klux Klan. He had also pursued a voter fraud case against three civil rights workers that some viewed as an attempt at voter intimidation. Sarah Wildman recalled the controversy in a May, 2009 article for the Guardian:
"The reasons for his rejection, as I explained in this 2002 New Republic story had to do with a soupy mix of dubious and arguably racist moves, comments and motivations on the part of the Alabama native that led senator Ted Kennedy to announce it was 'inconceivable … that a person of this attitude is qualified to be a US attorney, let alone a United States federal judge.'"
Breaking the Logjam
Ironically, back in March, the Obama administration had touted Hamilton as a moderate jurist with bipartisan support. In the Chicago Tribune story referenced above, Douglass Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center said of Hamilton, ""In any normal world, he should be confirmed easily and unanimously." After Hamilton's confirmation, Rebecca Lehrman and the Blog for our Future protested, "The protracted pace of judicial confirmations is outrageous."
DC Dicta points to a Nov. Roll Call report that the Obama administration is asking Senate Democrats for help in finding judicial nominees who might attract bipartisan support. But don't expect the pace of judicial confirmations to pick up anytime soon. Last month, a Republican strategist reportedly told CNN that what Republicans are doing is par for the course:
"Senate Democrats did it too when they were in the minority," he told CNN. It's "just a tool that the minority uses to get more of what they want because they don't control the agenda and it's very hard to be heard."
However, Kendall noted on his blog that the comparison to the Bush administration doesn't really hold up:
it is still the case that more than 40 percent (131 of 322) of all Bush’s confirmed nominees were passed by voice vote without any
