Government

Senate Democrats Look To Confirm Judges ASAP After Patrick Leahy's Hospital Trip

Fifty-Fifty is TIGHT.

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Sure it would be cool to have deputies confirmed at the Justice Department. And new U.S. Attorneys, too, while we’re at it. What would be extremely uncool, though, at least for Senate Democrats, would be if they suddenly lost their majority and had to spend four more years in the wilderness unable to fill any vacancies in the judiciary. That would suck!

And nothing concentrates the mind like your 80-year-old colleague Sen. Patrick Leahy taking a trip to the hospital for a “muscle spasm” just days after your side finally got its hands back on the majority gavel. Particularly when that colleague hails from a state with a Republican governor, even one who has promised to appoint a Democrat if a vacancy arises.

Politico reports:

Senate Democrats are pushing to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominees for top Justice Department posts as soon as possible. But some advocates are urging a different approach, calling on the Judiciary Committee to deal with judicial vacancies before filling out the rest of Biden’s DOJ team.

The intra-party debate reflects the overriding urgency some activists feel to rush Biden-appointed judges through the confirmation gauntlet while Democrats control the Senate. And how the party ends up deciding which to prioritize could end up determining the legacy Biden leaves on the country’s judicial landscape.

Democrats remember well that Mitch McConnell blockaded Obama’s judicial nominees and refused to give Judge Merrick Garland a hearing when he was nominated to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat, only to turn around and blow up the filibuster for the Supreme Court and the blue-slip procedure for circuit court nominees, embarking on a breakneck spree of confirmations to install upwards of 200 (mostly young) conservative judges on the federal bench.

“I think, once we have the leadership at Main Justice, we should potentially turn to judges because some of those vacancies are outstanding,” Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal told Politico.

It’s a sentiment shared by Caroline Fredrickson, a liberal legal advocate and former president of the American Constitution Society. “The judicial nominees cannot be after the deputy assistant secretary of whatever department. … They need to see it as a top priority and move it ahead of the other nominees,” she told Politico. “These are lifetime appointments. … Just front-load them.”

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Which sounds great, but see… SENATE. Literally nothing moves fast in that “deliberative” body. As Politico notes, Biden’s incoming White House Counsel Dana Remus asked Senators in December to submit recommendations by January 19 to fill dozens of judicial vacancies. Without the aide of a leftwing Leonard Leo, most didn’t meet the deadline.

Meanwhile, Merrick Garland’s nomination to be Attorney General still hasn’t gotten a vote in Judiciary, so we can’t even talk about filling his seat on the DC Circuit. (Do that one first, please!)

Thankfully, Sen. Leahy is back at work and appears to be doing well. “I had some muscle spasms. And normally I would have said ‘to hell with it, to heck with it,’ but they didn’t stop,” he told reporters grumpily, insisting that he’s just fine, no need to keep asking.

This is no way to run a railroad, but we’ll keep chugging along.

Senate weighs jumping Biden judicial picks ahead of the queue [Politico]
Leahy’s hospitalization shows Dems’ majority hangs by thread [Politico]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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