Conservative group begins push on Trump court picks
WASHINGTON — A conservative group that had an important role in placing Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court will launch a big-money effort Monday to get President Donald Trump’s lowercourt nominees confirmed by the Senate.
Concerned Veterans for America, part of the network financed by the industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, will begin its campaign to engage its activists at the local level, primarily in states where Democratic senators could block the Trump nominees.
Getting the confirmations is “one issue that Republicans can all agree on: We need to fill these vacancies,” said Mark Lucas, executive director of the group.
With more than 120 judicial vacancies, Trump has a huge number of federal judgeships to fill, giving Republicans an enormous opportunity to remake the federal courts.
Most prominent are the vacancies on circuit courts of appeal, which often set legal precedent and in effect guide federal law in their respective regions unless the Supreme Court steps in.
Concerned Veterans’ efforts includes a new website, which the group hopes will mobilize its members to lobby lawmakers in states including Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Colorado, where they fear Democratic senators could hold up key nominations.
The group, which claims to have placed more than 350,000 phone calls into Senate offices on Gorsuch’s behalf, this time plans phone banks, ads and mailers in states where Trump nominees are blocked. The cost of the campaign was not revealed.
“We’ve seen how important that ( judicial) branch is to uphold our policy agenda,” Lucas said.
The group also is targeting the Senate Judiciary Committee’s longstanding “blue slip” tradition.
A state’s two senators give the committee a “blue slip” with their opinion on a nominee. A negative blue slip usually dooms the choice.
The committee’s chairman has traditionally decided how much weight to give the tradition.
“We believe the blue slip should not be an opportunity for any party to obstruct the judicial nominating process,” Lucas said. “Not all Democrats are doing that, but there are some who are trying to take these nominations hostage by utilizing this old, archaic Senate tradition and not judging these folks on their legal qualifications.”
The Alliance for Justice, a liberal group that tracks the federal judicial system, noted that many vacancies are the result of Republicans blocking or slowing President Barack Obama’s nominees. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold hearings, let alone a vote, on Obama’s March 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court to replace the late Antonin Scalia. Trump this year nominated Gorsuch to fill the vacancy.
“It’s very, very rich that Republicans now are crying foul when Democrats are insisting that they’re entitled to the same rights Republicans had,” said Daniel Goldberg, the group’s legal director.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has said he plans to usually adhere to the blue slip policy for lower court nominees but suggested that he could call for a committee vote for circuit court judges, even if the home-state senators object. “The blue slip is more respected for district court judges historically,” Grassley said in a May interview on C-SPAN. Circuit court nominees, he said, are “much more a White House decision.”
The committee’s top Democrat last month warned against disregarding the discretion given the homestate senators, noting that it’s been a Senate tradition since 1917.
“The blue slip is the one opportunity that homestate senators have to weigh in on judges that will serve their constituents, and it has always been taken seriously,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. She said blue slips were honored during Obama’s presidency, even when Republicans did not return slips for more than two years.