GOP policy for picking judges will be retained
Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s new Democratic leader, is retaining a Republican rule that allowed President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees to be confirmed to federal appeals courts over homestate senators’ objections.
Under a longtime Judiciary Committee policy, senators from the home state of a president’s judicial nominees are given blue slips of paper that they can return to the committee if they approve of the nominee. Some committee chairs, including the most recent Democratic chairmen, have allowed senators to veto a nominee by withholding a blue slip, while others have allowed the nominations to proceed, sometimes requiring the president to consult with the homestate senators.
During Trump’s presidency, committee Chairmen Chuck Grassley, RIowa, and Lindsey Graham, RS.C., eliminated the blueslip process for appeals court nominees while retaining it for U.S. District Courts.
The Republicancontrolled Senate confirmed 54 of Trump’s appeals court selections in four years — one fewer than President Barack Obama appointed in eight years — including 10 to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the nation’s largest federal appellate court.
Four of the Ninth
Circuit appointees — Daniel Bress, Patrick Bumatay, Daniel Collins and Kenneth Lee — were from California and might have been blocked by one of the state’s Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, under the former policy. Altogether, 18 Trump appointees to appeals courts came from states with at least one Democratic senator who could have objected to their nomination, the committee said.
The Senate confirmed 174 Trump nominees to U.S. District Courts, including 85 approved by Democrats who returned their blue slips.
With Democrats now in control of the Senate and the White House, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Durbin,
DIll., has decided to follow the same policy and allow President Biden’s appeals court nominees to be considered by the committee regardless of a homestate senator’s objections. Nominees to the triallevel District Courts will remain subject to blue slips.
“Chair Durbin has said on a number of occasions that there cannot be one set of rules for Republican nominees and another set of rules for Democratic nominees,” said a committee staff aide, who asked not to be identified.
“There’s no reason for Senate Democrats to revert back to the old rules just to make it more difficult on themselves,” said Nan Aron, president of Alliance for
Justice, a liberal nonprofit. “There is a shocking lack of diversity on several of our circuit courts — including panels without a single judge of color — that the Biden administration has a real opportunity to rectify.”