Democrats Still Obstructing Judicial Appointments

Senate Democrats Continue to Obstruct Appointments to the Federal Judiciary

The clock is ticking on the deal that Democrats and Republicans have struck over the President’s judicial nominees, which calls for three appeals courts nominees to be approved by Memorial Day.

For the past 16 months Senate Democrats have been on a course of approving a record-low number of nominees in the final two years of a President’s term. Now they appear to have maneuvered the White House into agreeing to a compromise where two of the three nominees in the deal would, in fact, be the Democrats’ own picks. One of them, Helene White, is Sen. Carl Levin’s (D-Mich.) “cousin-in-law,” whose nomination to the bench was blocked by Republicans more than a decade ago. Determined to move her forward, Levin blocked four nominees for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until the President agreed to nominate White.

Now Sen. Levin wishes to count White toward the three-judge target by Memorial Day. Because the Sixth Circuit would still have a small Republican-nominated majority even with the addition of White and another nominee President Bush actually wants, Levin can posture, as he did to the New York Times yesterday, that it would “not be appropriate” to take the political balance of the Sixth Circuit into consideration. GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee respond that the Memorial Day compromise lets the obstructing Senate majority approve two Democratic choices and leave a long list of Presidential nominees waiting in a limbo that has lingered for years.

The whole process is a spectacle unworthy of the Senate. Judicial choices will always matter, but that they matter so much is a result of the fact that judges now routinely legislate from the bench. Our founders did not want a partisan judiciary. We have one, and it’s high time our timorous politicians emerge from behind the black robes of policy-making judges and reclaim their legislative authority, even if that means having to vote on tough issues they would rather kick over to the unelected branch.