“I firmly believe that these tactics have damaged the judicial nomination process to an unacceptable degree, and now it must be corrected,” Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.) said. “It is shameful that the action of a handful of Senators has created a vacancy crisis that threatens the service of the very justice upon which our great nation depends.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Of all the arguments the right has to offer, this is the dumbest. Indeed, it was<\/i> a legitimate argument in the late 1990s — when Democrats were using it.
\n
\nIf the right wants to complain about over-use of the filibuster, fine. If they want to note how historically unusual this is, no problem. If they insist the blocked nominees are qualified, I’m appalled, but it’s open for discussion. But to argue that the Senate needs to do away with the filibuster because of court vacancies simply doesn’t reflect reality.<\/p>\n
There are 179 seats in the federal appellate court system. Right now, 163 of them are filled. Those 16 empty seats are the lowest number of vacancies in nearly two decades<\/i>. There is no “vacancy crisis.” Federal appeals courts do not “sit empty.” Maybe Republican focus groups liked this line of reasoning, but it’s just wrong.<\/p>\n
As luck would have it, this new GOP argument has everything backwards. When Republican senators were blocking Clinton judicial nominees from receiving up-or-down votes, the vacancy rate was nearing all-time highs. No less than Chief Justice William Rehnquist — hardly a lefty — described the problem as a “crisis” in 1996 and 1997. At the time, Republicans couldn’t care less about Americans having their cases delayed or overburdening other judges. And to borrow Allard’s phrase, they certainly didn’t care that these vacancies might “threaten the service of the very justice upon which our great nation depends.”<\/p>\n
Indeed, their plan worked. Clinton’s nominees were blocked, Bush took office, and the Senate began confirming judges right and further right. Empty seats were filled, the vacancy rate shrank, and the crisis ended.<\/p>\n
Is it too much to ask that conservatives use their good arguments instead of their dumb ones? Apparently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m on board with the entire Dem strategy when it comes to judicial nominees. I agree with the filibusters, the strategy in dealing with the nuclear option, the attempts at negotiations that aren’t going anywhere, the whole shebang. I do, however, realize that there are semi-legitimate arguments on the other side. I think the Republicans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}