Tag Archives: Topic: Nominations

Politico: What should Obama do to take advantage of this momentum? It is time for him to focus on a neglected but important part of the nominations process: the problems with how senators supply the president with candidates to be nominated to the federal bench.

AP: The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved three of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees for a full Senate vote — including one for the influential D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Politico: The 2-1 decision Thursday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (posted here) found that the presidential recess appointment power is limited to breaks between sessions of Congress, not breaks within sessions or other adjournments during which the Senate might meet in pro forma sessions. The reasoning mirrors that in a ruling of the D.C. Circuit Court in January.

NY Times: President Obama’s latest cabinet-level nominees are running into deep resistance in the Senate, pitching Democrats and Republicans into another tense standoff over White House appointments.

The HIll: The partisan battle over President Obama’s Labor Department nominee ran hot again on Wednesday as Republicans used an obscure Senate rule to postpone a committee vote.

Lyle Denniston reports at SCOTUS Blog: The Obama administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to restore the President’s power to fill vacancies in government posts when the Senate is out of town. The petition argued that the D.C. Circuit Court got it wrong in January in sharply curtailing that authority.  (The Circuit Court’s ruling — discussed in this earlier post – is attached as an appendix to the petition but also can be read here.)

Blog of the Legal Times: The Senate confirmed Jane Kelly to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on Wednesday, faster than any other circuit court nominee during the Obama administration. How in less than three months did she navigate a process that has come to represent partisan bickering and Senate gridlock?

Boston Globe: New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan is appointing a Judicial Selection Commission to advise her on judicial nominations.

National Review: In the letter, nine Republicans on the HELP committee, including ranking member Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) and Rand Paul (R., Ky.), ask that the mark-up occur later than Wednesday, when it is currently scheduled, saying that the nomination is “premature for consideration because there are a number of requests for information that remain outstanding.”

TribLive: Senate Democrats, largely shut out of budget talks the past two years, may enter budget season with clout. The minority party has something Republican Gov. Tom Corbett needs: votes for a Supreme Court nominee.

Blog of the Legal Times: A group of 360 ABA members from all 50 states came to D.C. for the group’s annual ABA Day, which included trips to Capitol Hill on Wednesday and Thursday. The lawyers urged members of Congress to quickly fill empty seats in the federal judiciary and support increased funding for federal courts and the Legal Services Corp., the largest civil legal aid provider in the United States.

Russell Wheeler at Brookings: Last week, Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Charles Grassley (R-IA.), said “we hear a lot about the vacancy rates. There are currently 86 vacancies for federal courts. But of course, you never hear the President mention the 62 vacancies that have no nominee. That is because those 62 vacancies represent nearly 75 percent of the total vacancies.”

Blog of the Legal Times: Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez might be nominated to lead the Department of Labor, but the inner workings of Department of Justice took center stage at his confirmation hearing Thursday on Capitol Hill.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: But the agreement announced by Johnson and Baldwin calls for partisan parity. Each senator, regardless of whether he or she belongs to the same party as the president, will appoint three members to a six-member nominating commission. Johnson pushed for the change, and had the leverage to get it. That’s because individual senators currently enjoy effective veto power over federal judicial nominations in their own states.

The Hill: The judicial appointment process has been broken for two decades. Through the first two centuries of our republic, the Senate was renowned as the world’s greatest deliberative body, the home of lawmakers and statespeople who understood not only the impact of soaring rhetoric but also the value of collaboration and compromise. Senators assiduously exercised their authority to provide advice and consent on judicial nominations.

Ed Whelan at NRO: I’ll add another reason: Perez, in his current capacity as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Justice Department, signed on to the Obama administration’s brief in the Hosanna-Tabor case, a brief that was remarkably hostile to the religious-liberty right of churches and other religious organizations to select their own faith leaders.

NY Times: Liberals are tearing into a Republican plan to reduce the number of judges on the country’s most important appeals court, calling it a political ploy to keep President Obama from making the court less conservative.

Reuters: Lawmakers held a spirited discussion on the immediate future of the National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday, after a recent appeals court ruling that cast doubt on the board’s authority to make decisions.

NY Times: Sri Srinivasan, President Obama’s nominee to one of the country’s most politically significant appeals courts, breezed his way through an uneventful Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday that ended with at least one Republican saying he would support the nomination.

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Politico: Since 1948, every president except for Obama has had at least one of his nominees confirmed to the court. Obama cannot tolerate a filibuster of Srinivasan. If Republicans filibuster, he should break it. After the hearings, Obama should nominate a judge for each of the court’s remaining three vacancies.

Washington Post: President Obama nominated three candidates for full terms to the National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday, urging the Senate to confirm the nominees quickly.

AP: The Senate has confirmed New Jersey judge Patty Shwartz to serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Times Union: Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Friday nominated Sheila Abdus-Salaam, an appellate justice in Manhattan, to fill the final vacancy on the state’s highest court, where she will be the first black woman to serve.

Washington Post: While Obama has also been slow to fill some court vacancies, many nominations have stalled even after making through the Judiciary Committee unanimously. At this moment 15 such nominations are awaiting a Senate floor vote, 13 of which made it out of committee unanimously.

Washington Post: The effort reflects a new White House effort to tilt in its favor the conservative-dominated U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is one notch below the Supreme Court and considers many challenges to executive actions.

Bloomberg: President Barack Obama is pressing Republicans to stop obstructing federal judicial nominees, protesting the delays in private conversations with senators and in public declarations by administration officials

Politico: A dozen former top officials of the Justice Department’s Officer of Solicitor General banded together Monday to endorse President Barack Obama’s latest nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Sri Srinivasan.

NPR: But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has a whopping four vacancies, the most in the nation, including one opening that dates all the way back to 2005, when John Roberts moved to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Blog of the Legal Times: U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit nominee Sri Srinivasan will get a confirmation hearing this month, and he’s receiving more support from some top Washington lawyers.

Scott Cooper at PennLive: In the last week, there’s been another push to change the way Pennsylvania selects judges for the three appellate courts – Commonwealth, Superior, and Supreme — moving from direct election to an appointment system. Proponents argue a switch would take the politics out of the system by removing the need to raise funds to win election.

Wall Street Journal (via Google): On a conference call in March with the George Soros-funded Justice at Stake, former Governors Ed Rendell, Tom Ridge and Dick Thornburgh said they want judicial selection taken away from voters and given to a judicial nominating commission. The state’s current system of judicial elections, Mr. Ridge said, “casts a dark shadow, a heavy cloud over the integrity and independence of the judicial system.”

Blog of the Legal Times: The Senate has confirmed Ketanji Jackson to become a judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, filling the only open spot on the court.

Politico: Halligan had been nominated to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, but Senate Republicans blocked her confirmation for the second time earlier this month despite lamentations from the White House that she was enormously qualified and had waited more than 700 days since being nominated the first time in 2011.

Bloomberg: President Barack Obama’s appointment of labor board members last year while most senators were out of town met skepticism from appeals court judges weighing whether he overstepped his constitutional powers.

The Gazette: The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee approved Assistant Federal Public Defender Jane Kelly’s nomination to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Friday.

CNSNews: Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Democrats will “fill up the DC circuit one way or another,” even it means changing the rules in the Senate to get nominees confirmed.

Pocono Record: Voters may not know as much as they should about statewide judicial candidates. But the common sense of ordinary citizens inspires more confidence than savvy, politically motivated power brokers in smoke-filled rooms. Pennsylvanians need judges who are willing to face the voters, not who owe their appointment to insider fat cats.

FoxNews: President Obama nominated Justice Department official Thomas Perez for Labor secretary Monday — but the candidate could be haunted by a newly released report that found he gave incomplete testimony on the controversial decision to drop charges against members of the New Black Panther Party.

AP: President Barack Obama has chosen Thomas Perez, a top Justice Department official, to be the next secretary of labor, calling him a consensus builder whose “story reminds us of this country’s promise.”

Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy: Partisans in judicial nomination fights like to play the victim. As each side tells it, obstruction of judicial nominees is all the other side’s fault. Each act of contemporary obstruction is justified by some act of obstruction that came before. The reality, however, is that there are no clean hands in these fights any more. For over twenty-five years the two parties have been engaged in an escalating game of tit-for-tat. Each time the tables are turned, the opposition party retaliates in kind, and then some. Given the reactions to my post yesterday on judicial nominations, I thought it would be worth recounting the history (as I have before) — with the relevant data — and then to explain what it means. I’ll follow this up with a post on what I think should be done, in light of this history, to end the obstruction of judicial nominees.

Talking Points Memo: In a closed door lunch meeting with Senate Democrats on Tuesday, President Obama expressed his frustration with Republican slow-walking and filibustering of key nominees, and urged them to address the issue, according to a senior Senate Democratic aide.

SCOTUS Blog: The National Labor Relations Board will seek to go on to the Supreme Court in a major constitutional test of the President’s power to make appointments to government offices when the Senate is out of town, the Board announced Tuesday.

Volokh Conspiracy: No real surprise here: the NLRB is going to skip seeking en banc review of Canning v. NLRB and petition for cert.  There are scads of other cases now working their way through the courts of appeals and this is a way of resolving the issue once and for all.

Blog of the Legal Times: Over the next month, lawyers and judges interested in serving on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia can apply for a judicial vacancy that’s expected to open up this summer.

Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy: Over the weekend, the NYT published a highly misleading story about Republican filibusters of President Obama’s judicial nominees. Consider the very first sentence of the article: “A fresh feud over federal judgeships has again begun to agitate the Senate, with Republicans so far blocking President Obama from filling any of the four vacancies on the nation’s most prestigious and important appeals court.

David Fontana at Huffington Post: So maybe it is time to look outside of Washington, to look to the states for new and exciting judicial nominees who actually become judges. Why the states? Well, for one thing, there is less that Republicans who lose elections at the state level can do to block Democrats from getting progressive judges on the bench.

Blog of the Legal Times: The Senate unanimously confirmed Washington lawyer Richard Taranto to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Monday, more than 17 months after he was first nominated for the position and more than a year after his confirmation hearing.

Wall Street Journal (via Google News): Senate Republicans used a filibuster last week to block the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Democrats are in full boil. President Obama denounced “the Republican pattern of obstruction,” but Republicans are merely following the filibuster precedent that Democrats set when George W. Bush was President. Turnabout is unfair play.

The Montana Standard: The Montana Democrat will recommend that District Judge Susan Watters take U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull’s Billings seat and that Supreme Court Justice Brian Morris replace U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon of Great Falls.

The Hill: President Obama plans to nominate Thomas Perez, who heads Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, to become the next secretary of Labor, according to reports.

AP: Clark County District Judge Elissa Cadish submitted a letter to the senators, made public Friday, saying she asked President Barack Obama to withdraw the nomination after it appeared to have reached an impasse.

NPR: It’s not solely Senate Republicans who are to blame for the headless government. Obama has failed to put forward nominees for some posts, and Light says the president is “moving at a snail’s pace” to make other nominations. Light says the administration also has “the longest questionnaire in the presidential history for vetting people who might become nominees. It’s brutal.” That serves to discourage some people from wanting to become nominees in the first place.

AP: “Out of Order: Stories From the History of the Supreme Court” (Random House), by Sandra Day O’Connor

Washington Times: President Obama’s effort to reshape the federal judiciary will enter a new phase of open warfare with Republican lawmakers Wednesday when the Senate votes on whether to break the filibuster of Caitlin Halligan’s nomination for a seat on the prestigious D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Roll Call: The Senate voted 51-41 to end debate on the nomination, nine votes shy of the 60 needed to move forward. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to cross party lines, voting to invoke cloture.

Washington Times: Facing the stiffest Republican opposition to a judicial nominee in two years, the White House is pushing for a confirmation vote this week on Caitlin Halligan’s appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Washington Blade: The U.S. Senate on Monday evening made history with little difficulty when it confirmed the first openly gay Asian-American for a seat on the federal bench. By a voice vote, the Senate confirmed Pamela Ki Mai Chen, a lesbian, for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Blog of the Legal Times: The Senate will vote Wednesday morning on Caitlin Halligan, the embattled nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, as part of a recent Democratic push to fill federal judicial vacancies.

LifeNews: Americans United for Life Action President and CEO Dr. Charmaine Yoest called for the U.S. Senate to vote no on cloture on the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in what will be a scored vote on

Washington Post: In Florida, President Obama has nominated the first openly gay black man to sit on a federal district court. In New York, he has nominated the first Asian American lesbian. And his pick for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit? The first South Asian.

International Business Times: Halligan “is unqualified to sit on such a prestigious court because of her conduct in office, using her position in state government to advance radical, pro-abortion legal theories against the constitutional rights of pro-life citizens,” said AULA’s Dr. Yoest.

Texas Tribune: Roberts and his colleagues are off the leash. Their counterparts in Texas are not so lucky. Elected judges have to hope the politics work out — that voters will understand unpopular decisions and blame the people who write the laws and not the people who interpret them.

Blog of the Legal Times: The committee unanimously voted to approve Nelson Roman to be a judge for the Southern District of New York and Shelly Dick for the Middle District of Louisiana. The other nominees had opposition from Republicans: William Orrick for the Northern District of California was approved 11-7, and David Medine for the privacy board was approved 10-8.

Blog of the Legal Times: Jane Kelly got an extra friendly reception from the Senate Judiciary Committee at her confirmation hearing Wednesday for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, soaking up a stream of compliments and fielding questions about why diversity in the courts is important.

NewsOK: The Oklahoma City magistrate judge’s confirmation was delayed by politics for nearly nine months before he was unanimously approved by U.S. Senate

UK Supreme Court: Lord Neuberger, President of the Supreme Court, today welcomes the announcement of three appointments to the Court.

National Review Bench Memos: The body passed a proposed constitutional amendment to reform the state’s judicial selection system, by an overwhelming margin of 29 to 2.

AP: President Barack Obama is trying to change the face of a federal judiciary that has a long tradition of white men passing judgment on parties from all walks of life – if he can get his nominees past the Senate.

The Guardian: Senior legal figures believe promotion of three male judges to highest court delayed because ministers want a woman to fill one of the vacancies

National Review Bench Memos: President Obama’s nomination of Caitlin Halligan to a D.C. Circuit seat is scheduled for a Senate Judiciary Committee vote tomorrow.

Blog of the Legal Times: The Senate confirmed William Kayatta Jr. of Maine to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on Wednesday, making him the first new circuit judge to take the bench since June and the first federal judge confirmed during this session of Congress.

The Hill: Republican senators are blocking a vote on former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) this week unless he provides additional financial information, setting up what Democrats say is the first-ever filibuster of a Defense secretary nominee

Daily Mail: The incoming head of the CIA converted to Islam while working as a station chief in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, a former FBI agent has claimed. John Guandolo, who retired from the FBI in 2008, said in a radio interview that John Brennan – who has been nominated by Barack Obama as the new director of the CIA – visited the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina accompanied by Saudi officials who may have persuaded him to convert.

Reuters: President Barack Obama nominated Thursday an openly gay attorney to serve on the U.S. appeals court for patent cases after a previous gay nominee for that court stalled.