Senate delays judge votes

GOP logjam leaves Obama’s picks waiting

WASHINGTON — Judicial nominee Edward Stanton III of Memphis sailed smoothly through his confirmation hearing last week, with both of Tennessee’s U.S. senators extolling his qualifications for the federal bench and calling for speedy confirmation of his nomination.

But the Senate has been anything but speedy when it comes to confirming judicial nominees.

Nashville attorney Waverly Crenshaw Jr. has been waiting eight months for the Senate to confirm him as the newest federal judge in Tennessee’s Middle District.

Travis McDonough has been waiting even longer. President Barack Obama nominated the Chattanooga attorney last November for a judgeship in Tennessee’s Eastern District, but the Senate has yet to put his nomination to a vote.

Crenshaw and McDonough are caught in a logjam of judicial nominees awaiting a vote by the Senate. Only six judicial nominees have been confirmed since Republicans regained majority control of the Senate last January.

Eleven others are awaiting a vote, and Stanton will become the 12th if, as expected, his nomination is approved in the coming weeks by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“It’s going excruciatingly slowly, and there’s just no reason for it,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law who closely tracks the judicial nominations process.

A report last month by the liberal advocacy group Alliance for Justice charged that Senate Republicans have all but abandoned their constitutional duty to confirm federal judges. Instead, they have “engineered a politically motivated vacancy crisis, striving to preserve judicial vacancies for a future Republican president to fill,” the report said.

The trickle of nominees who have been confirmed since the GOP returned to power has been the slowest in 60 years, the report said. What’s more, the number of vacancies on the courts has increased from 43 to 67 since January. The number of “judicial emergencies,” meaning the remaining judges can’t keep up with the caseload, has more than doubled, jumping from 12 to 31 since January.

By comparison, during the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency, the Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed 68 judges.

Similarly, the Republican Senate confirmed 73 judges during President Bill Clinton’s final two years in office.

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, has defended the Senate’s process for confirming judicial nominees. Grassley insisted during a speech on the Senate floor in July that his committee is moving judicial nominees at about the same pace as it did at this point in Bush’s presidency.

The Senate has confirmed 313 judicial nominees during the Obama administration, compared to 287 confirmed by this point in 2007 under the Bush administration.

Others note that while the

Alliance for Justice is critical of the current pace of confirmations, it was involved in the filibuster of 10 of Bush’s nominees a decade ago.

Still, Tobias said the GOP Senate’s delay in confirming Obama’s nominees is unusual and extreme, and causes problems for the courts.

“It puts more pressure on judges,” he said. “It just means the senior judges work harder. The active judges work harder. But it also makes it much harder for litigants in federal courts in Tennessee to have their cases heard, to get trial dates and that type of thing, especially with civil cases.”

Tennessee’s two Republican senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, have done a good job of working with the White House to bring forward well-qualified, “consensus” nominees, Tobias said.

“They’ve gotten those people nominated. They’ve gotten them through the hearings. And now they’re sitting,” Tobias said of Crenshaw and McDonough. “Stanton may be the same.”

Stanton, the U.S. attorney for the 22-county Western District of Tennessee over the past five years, was nominated by Obama in May for a federal judgeship.

Alexander said all three Tennesseans awaiting a confirmation vote are “well-qualified nominees whom I have been glad to support.”

“I hope to see all three confirmed soon,” he said.

A Corker aide said the Senate is expected to vote on Crenshaw and McDonough’s nominations by the end of the year.