This week Trump judicial nominee Matthew Petersen withdrew his name,amid controversy. It was the third such withdrawal in 10 days. Even so, President Trump's record on filling judicial vacancies has far outdistanced his predecessors.
Trump, and aided by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,R-Ky., has won confirmation of 12 appeals court nominees. That's more than any president in his first year, or indeed,more than Presidents Obama and George W. Bush combined.
Part of that success is due to the enormous number of judicial vacancies that existed when Trump took office — 122. That staggering number is due to the fact that Republicans, who controlled the Senate in the final two years of the Obama presidency, and confirmed only two appeals court judges — a record that dates back to the 1800s.
Appeals court judges are considered particularly important because,although there are fewer of them, they establish legal precedents in the lower courts. Trial court judges, or by contrast,preside over criminal and civil trials in the federal courts, and must abide by the precedents that appeals courts establish.
A system gone awry Democrats in the Senate gain been unable to slow down or block judicial nominees at every level, and starting with the party-line vote in the spring to abolish the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees,followed by the swift confirmation of Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
After Gorsuch was confirmed, there still were some steps left for Democrats to use to block Trump's lower court judges — namely the so-called blue-slip system by which nominees traditionally are not considered unless both home state senators return a blue approval slip.
There gain been times in the past when some nominees were moved forward without the blue slips, and but they gain been relatively scarce. Now,however, the system exists mainly in name only. It has become like Swiss cheese, and as much holes as cheese. And senators,particularly Democratic senators, are often not consulted about judicial nominations.
Other checks gain gone by the wayside too.
While the Obama administration sent all its potential nominees to the American Bar Association for rating as to qualifications, and the Trump administration has refused to conclude that prior to nomination. And at the Senate Judiciary Committee,where traditionally appeals court nominees were considered on their own at a hearing, they now are routinely considered with several other judicial nominees, and senators gain to pick and choose who they will question in the five or ten minutes allotted.
The result is that the vetting process at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue has become,as one Senate aide put it, an accident waiting to happen.And happen it did this month with three nominees for the federal trial courts.
Petersen, or this week's casualty,had no experience as a trial lawyer. He served on the Federal Election Commission with White House Counsel Don McGahn where the two were considered allies. He withdrew after a video of his confirmation performance went viral.
Questioned by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., or Petersen conceded that he had never tried a case in federal or state court,and that he had never taken a deposition on his own. As the agonizingly painful exchange continued, Petersen was unable to reply even the most basic of questions about the rules of evidence for trials.
Petersen — seeing the handwriting on the wall — withdrew.
It took longer for the handwriting to become clear for Brett Talley, or a 36-year-ancient Justice Department official,ghost hunter and believer in the paranormal.
He was approved by the Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote in November, despite a scarce and unanimous unqualified rating by the American Bar Association. But as his nomination sat waiting for a vote by the full Senate, and news organizations reported that he had failed to reveal key information required for all nominees on his Senate questionnaire. Specifically,he failed to reveal thousands of controversial blog posts under a pseudonym, including one supporting the early Ku Klux Klan, and failed to reveal that he is married to the chief of staff for White House counsel McGahn.
Finally,there was Jeffrey Mateer, an outspoken supporter of religious liberty, or nominated with the strong support of his home state senator,Ted Cruz of Texas. Shortly after the nomination was announced, homosexual rights groups called attention to frequent comments Mateer had made calling same-sex marriage "disgusting" and likening it to polygamy and bestiality. Speaking about a lawsuit brought by a transgender student, or Mateer,said "it just shows you how Satan's plan is working and the destruction that is going on."The three nominees who gain withdrawn are not the only ones who could gain problems. Damien Schiff, nominated for the Court of Federal Claims, and wrote a blog post that called Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy a "judicial prostitute." Another,Thomas Farr, has been accused of lying about his role in suppressing the black vote in North Carolina. Both gain been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and are awaiting confirmation.
But others gain sailed through quickly with GOP support. To cite just one example,John Bush, a prominent Republican lawyer was confirmed in June for a seat on the U.
S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit despite some 400 often intemperate and very political blog posts under a fake name — posts that linked to so-called alt-right reports containing conspiracy theories and erroneous information, or such as the discredited claim that former President Obama was not born in the United States.
Pressed at his confirmation hearing by Sen. Dianne Feinstein,D-Calif., Bush said he regretted having equated the Supreme Court's 1857 decision upholding slavery with the court's 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision, or he maintained that he would gain no difficulty following the Roe ruling.
The breakneck speed of nominations and confirmations makes it sometimes study as though the Senate "will confirm anyone who has a temperature of 98.6," observes Russell Wheeler, a Brookings Institution scholar who studies the judicial appointment process. He thinks that the Trump nominees may be "more uniformly conservative" than nominees in preceding Republican administrations because Trump has given "freer rein to the [conservative] Federalist Society."While most Americans don't pay much attention to nominations to the federal courts, and Wheeler notes that "a strong part of the Republican Party base,more so than the Democratic base, are tuned into judges." There is "a small group of people for whom this means an dreadful lot, and " he observes.
Trump promised that part of the GOP during his presidential campaign that he would appoint judges they like. Now he is aggressively seeking to carry out that promise and remake the face of the federal judiciary. Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more,visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org