Stop partisan bickering on federal judges
The U.S. Senate last week put up another impressive display of how rancorously partisan that august body has become when it voted to confirm Tennesseans Eli Richardson and Mark Norris to federal district judgeships in Middle and West Tennessee, respectively.
The two nearly party-line votes — only three Democrats voted for one of the two and none voted for both — ended an almost two-year effort to stock the federal bench in the state and relieve a badly overloaded court.
“Everything in Washington has become more partisan and that includes confirming federal judges,” said Kent Syler, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University. “The Brett Kavanaugh hearings further polarized the process along party lines.”
But the votes for Richardson and Norris are much more illustrative of the effect that partisanship is having on the everyday function of the judiciary than is the Kavanaugh saga.
In 2015, when I first began following this issue then as a freelance reporter, there were 67 judicial vacancies across the federal judiciary and 29 nominees awaiting confirmation, according to a story I reported at the time.
Now there are 132 vacancies and 56 nominees awaiting confirmation.
Richardson and Norris were nominated along with William “Chip” Campbell Jr. of Nashville and Thomas Parker of Memphis in July of 2017 to fill a total of four empty judgeships. Campbell and Parker were confirmed easily by January in unanimous Senate votes. But Richardson and Norris got snagged in Washington’s partisan preoccupation.
For Norris, the state Senate majority leader who has spent nearly 25 years in partisan politics, it was all a little too predictable. A man in his position has a few too many inflammatory statements under his rhetorical belt, and he took fire from liberal groups over his opposition to samesex marriage as well as other comments.
He promised in his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to set aside his views on the bench, which is really the only thing he could say.
Richardson, though, came under fire for a decades-old reprimand a federal judge issued against him for bringing a lawsuit she said was unfounded and meant as retribution toward a woman who had won a sexual harassment suit from a company Richardson represented.
Richardson defended his conduct to the Judiciary Committee, but although the allegations were quite obscure to the general public, they were enough to earn him 43 votes against him on the Senate floor.
U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander and U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen recently traded barbs on the subject in dueling op-eds in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
“The problem is, even though Democrats can’t ultimately defeat these nominations, they’re delaying their approval by requiring the Senate to take a maximum amount of time to consider even less significant nominations and those that are not controversial,” Alexander wrote.
Cohen retorted that Republicans had shot down plenty of former President Barack Obama’s nominees, including Ed Stanton, a former U.S. attorney in Memphis who was once nominated for the seat now occupied by Parker.
Stanton never got a Senate vote at all, despite the backing of Alexander and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker.
These two gentlemen are both right. The only thing bipartisan in this bit of theater is the utter hypocrisy in their arguments.
Alex Hubbard is a columnist for the USA TODAY NETWORK Tennessee. Email him at dhubbard@tennessean.com or follow him on Twitter @alexhubbard7.