Now that Senate Democrats have eliminated the filibuster for judicial and executive branch nominees, it will be somewhat easier to confirm potentially controversial nominees to the federal bench. In anticipation of this shift, Ian Millhiser of Think Progress identified “5 People Who Could Be Confirmed To The Supreme Court Once The Filibuster Is Nuked,” including […]
Archive | Judicial Nominations
Who “Won” the Nuking of Filibusters?
Last week Senate Democrats voted to end filibusters of all executive branch and lower court nominees. The filibuster of Supreme Court nominees will almost certainly follow if and when there is a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee. [That is, it will be eliminated as well.] Who wins and loses from this change in the […]
Ending the Filibuster — A View from the Bench
Senior district court judge Richard George Kopf comments on the end of judicial nomination filibusters on his blog, Hercules and the Empire. (Hat tip: How Appealing.) And for those who don’t have enough of my take on this issue, here’s a piece I had Friday on NRO.
Nukes for the NYT, But Not for Thee
In May 2005, the NYT editorial board insisted that the filibuster of judicial nominations was “part of the Senate’s time-honored deliberative role and of its protection of minority rights.” Invocation of the “nuclear option,” the Times insisted, would “desecrate” this tradition. “The damage would be incalculable,” the Times warned. Fast forward eight years and, as Patterico notes, the […]
Senate Goes Nuclear, Expect Fallout
As threatened, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the so-called “nuclear option” to end the filibuster of presidential nominations. The Washington Post reports: The vote to change the rule passed 52 to 48. Three Democrats — Sens. Carl Levin (Mich.), Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Mark Pryor (Ark.) — joined 45 Republicans in opposing the measure. Levin is […]
A Time to Go Nuclear?
In February 2003, Miguel Estrada became the first ever nominee to a federal appellate court to be successfully filibustered when a majority of Senate Democrats voted against cloture on his nomination. Estrada had been nominated to fill on a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and was widely seen as […]
Professor David Barron Nominated to the First Circuit
This afternoon President Obama nominated Harvard Law School professor David Barron to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Professor Barron is currently the S. William Green Professor of Public Law and previously served as the Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of […]
EPA Fares Well in D.C. Circuit
By Jonathan H. Adler on August 28, 2013 8:16 pm in Administrative Law, Environment, Judicial Nominations
As I noted here, some progressives argue that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is engaged in a “judicial jihad against the regulatory state,” environmental regulations in particular. It seems someone forgot to tell the judges on the D.C. Circuit, for as Greenwire reports, the Environmental Protection Agency fares rather well in a […]
From A Crawl to A Sprint: Obama and the D.C. Circuit
On June 4, 2013, President Obama made three nominations to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. It remains to be seen how many of these nominees will be confirmed to this essential court. Republicans are in no rush to fill more seats on this Circuit, having already defeated one nominee to this […]
Is the D.C. Circuit a “Broken Circuit”?
Earlier this summer, the Environmental Law Institute’s Environmental Forum featured a cover story on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by Doug Kendall and Simon Lazarus of the Constitutional Accountability Center entitled “Broken Circuit.” As the sub-head promised, this article made the case that “A new breed of activism on the Court […]
Judicial Nominations and Competing Constitutional “Mainstreams”
By Ilya Somin on March 19, 2013 8:15 pm in Conservatism, Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Judicial Nominations
In a recent column, Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein argues that Republican senators who have filibustered some of Barack Obama’s judicial nominees are more to blame than Democrats who previously filibustered GOP nominees because the Democrats only tried to block nominees who were “out of the mainstream,” while the GOP targeted any nominees whom they […]
Blue Slips vs. Filibusters
In the comments to my recent judicial nomination posts, some have wondered why I insist on distinguishing between blue slips and filibusters. So I thought I’d quickly address this point before posting on how to end the obstruction of judicial nominees. The reason for distinguishing between filibusters and blue slips is that these two modes […]
On Judicial Confirmations — History and Numbers
Partisans in judicial nomination fights like to play the victim. As each side tells it, obstruction of judicial nominees is all the other side’s fault. Each act of contemporary obstruction is justified by some act of obstruction that came before. The reality, however, is that there are no clean hands in these fights any more. […]
The NYT‘s Selective History on Judicial Filibusters
Over the weekend, the NYT published a highly misleading story about Republican filibusters of President Obama’s judicial nominees. Consider the very first sentence of the article: “A fresh feud over federal judgeships has again begun to agitate the Senate, with Republicans so far blocking President Obama from filling any of the four vacancies on the […]
Judicial Nominations of Legal Scholars: How Much Does Prior Scholarship Indicate Likely Decisions on the Bench?
CUNY Law Professor Jenny Rivera has been nominated for a position on the New York Court of Appeals. In a hearing earlier this week, some of the questioning focused on her article, An Equal Protection Standard for National Origin Subclassifications: The Context that Matters, 82 Wash. L. Rev 897 (2007), the abstract of which includes […]