Editorials & Other Articles

sharedvalues

(6,916 posts) Sun Feb 24, 2019, 12:12 AM Feb 2019

Republicans trying to further stuff the courts with judges: How Dems could act.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/trump-judicial-appointments-mcconnell-democrats-chris-kang.html

The conventional wisdom on both sides is that because Democrats are now in the minority, and judges can now be confirmed with a simple majority vote, Democrats don’t have any leverage. As long as both sides buy into that theory, the White House has no incentive to actually work with Democratic senators. And Republican senators have no incentive to back down.

What I think the Democratic senators need to realize is they actually have a lot of power and influence left still. The irony is that the power they have left is in the blue slips. They still have blue slips to prevent district court nominees from moving forward. This is something that Sen. Graham has repeated now many times in his scant few weeks here as Judiciary chairman: that he will continue to observe the blue slip process for district court vacancies.

If every Democratic senator says we’re going to withhold the 76 blue slips we have, that would stop President Trump from being able to fill almost half the judicial vacancies that exist now. That changes the incentive structure. That changes the ability to have a conversation and really push to get better judges in the circuit court system and maybe restore some semblance of a blue slip process for circuit courts.

1 replies

= new reply since forum marked as read

Highlight:

Republicans trying to further stuff the courts with judges: How Dems could act. (Original Post) sharedvalues Feb 2019 OP

And to address "Republicans would do the same later" sharedvalues Feb 2019 #1

sharedvalues

(6,916 posts)

1. And to address "Republicans would do the same later"

Reply to sharedvalues (Original post)

Sun Feb 24, 2019, 12:13 AM

Feb 2019

This idea that there’s going to be something bigger down the line that’s going to be more important than the courts is fundamentally misunderstanding the role and the importance of our courts. But also, the idea that if Democrats just play nice, Republicans will be bipartisan down the line is laughable.

I think one of the most frustrating things to me has been that Democrats don’t have any response whenever Republicans change the rules. So, for example, when Republicans changed the voting threshold for Neil Gorsuch and jammed him through, what did Democrats do in response? They didn’t institutionally as a caucus have any response. When Republicans were running a sham confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats decided that that would be the time that they’d start letting judicial nominees move by unanimous consent.

Meanwhile, look what Republicans did when Democrats changed the rules to overcome Republican obstruction on the courts in 2013. In response, Republicans forced Democrats to file 130 cloture votes in a 13-month period—there have only been 90 in history before that. That’s a response.

...

I will say that Sen. Mazie Hirono has been the leader on this. Once Republicans first ignored a Democratic senator’s blue slip and moved forward the nomination of David Stras, she started voting “no” on every single Trump judge on cloture. We’ve seen just last week Sens. Kamala Harris and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand—because their blue slip prerogative has been overruled—they’ve come out and said they’re going to vote “no” on every single circuit judge.

That’s an important shift in the mentality to begin looking beyond the individual nominees that they object to, but at the end of the day it’s not going to actually change the incentive structure. Democrats withholding their blue slips on district court nominees would.

Reply to this discussion