It's Monday, May 16 and Day 93 since Justice Antonin Scalia died and Mitch McConnell laid down his Supreme Court blockade: No meetings, no hearings, no votes on his replacement. It's also Day 61 since President Obama named Merrick Garland to be Scalia's replacement. What's the Senate doing today instead of considering the Supreme Court nominee?
Voting on a judge. Paula Xinis, who has been waiting for a floor vote to fill the vacancy on the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Southern Division since last September, is finally getting her vote. She's lucky to be getting it. She's lucky to have been approved by the Judiciary Committee at all, because that doesn't happen much under Chuck Grassley.
For judicial confirmations, [People for the American Way executive vice president Marge] Baker lay the blame squarely on Senator Charles Grassley, the chair of the Judiciary Committee who—in part because of the Garland fiasco—is now locked in a fierce re-election battle.
"Senator Leahy worked hard in the last two years of Bush's presidency to continue processing nominees," she said. "Grassley is not. He is not just the judiciary chair for the Republican party—he's the judiciary chair for the whole country. It's indefensible."
PFAW's own analysis, released this week, revealed that under Grassley's leadership, the judicial confirmation rate has been 25%. Leahy's was 58%. A recent PFAW press release dubbed Grassley the "Do-Nothing Chairman." […]
"Not having these courts adequately staffed creates a real impediment for average Americans—business people, everybody —to get justice in the courts," she said.
Indeed, the number of "Judicial Emergencies"—a formal designation by the federal court system for when the per-judge caseload is so high that it endangers access to justice—has nearly tripled in the last two years, from 12 in January 2014, to 32 in April 2016.
There were 19 judicial emergencies during the mid-point of George W. Bush's final year in office, a number that had been reduced by the Democratic Senate and a judiciary chair and Senate leader who took their jobs seriously. The Garland blockade is an extreme manifestation of what the Republicans have purposefully done to the federal judiciary—but it sure doesn't tell the whole story.
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