ConfirmThem

http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070730/OPINION...

For Mississippians, the Senate's idleness is local. The Senate can't seem to confirm any Mississippian for the crucial 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The latest nominee - like the two previous ones - is bottled up in committee at the behest of Washington-based, liberal special interest groups, insisting on a candidate who will make laws from the bench, advocated by the groups.

No one in Congress believes Judge Leslie Southwick isn't well qualified. He's being smeared by liberal attack dogs in Washington because he's a conservative from Mississippi. And unfortunately some on the Senate Judiciary Committee have acquiesced to this shameful surrogate attack.

The article gives a brief overview about recess appointments.
This seems to be a good topic of discussion given that we have a few CCA nominees who some on this site have considered to be good recess appointees.

Curiously, Keisler is not mentioned by name, only Southwick.

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20070729/NEWS/707290339/-1/NEWS03

Courtesy of How Appealing,

http://www.timesdispatch.com/cva/ric/news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2007...

"Widener, now in his 80s, had told President Bush in 2001 he would take senior status -- a kind of semi-retirement that opens a judge's seat to a new appointee -- when a successor was confirmed. None ever was.

"I think Bush has lost an opportunity here," said Carl Tobias, law professor at the University of Richmond. "It's late [in his final term] to fill a third of the seats."

http://www.timesdispatch.com/cva/ric/opinion.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2...

"J. Michael Luttig resigned from the 4th Circuit last May to become chief counsel for Boeing. Fourteen months have passed. Bush has not nominated a replacement.

Numerous Virginians possess the professional credentials, the intellectual heft, and the personal temperament essential to a seat on the 4th Circuit. Bush should have nominated someone last year. Sens. John Warner and Jim Webb have submitted names to the White House. Their roster contains individuals - such as Donald Lemons of the Virginia Supreme Court - with the potential to win bipartisan backing. An administration that allows vacancies to languish undermines its own arguments about congressional obstructionism. The 4th Circuit is not the only panel affected by Bush's wilfull incompetence. As of last week, there were 48 vacancies on the federal bench but only 26 pending nominees."

Bush needs to be very careful about any judges he recess appoints in August. Those nominees will be excoriated and challenged by the Senate Dems. Potentially such an action could result in the Dems refusing to confirm any more Bush judges. For reasons I have mentioned before, I do not think Southwick is a good candidate on which to base a court battle about recess-appointments. Due to his superior credentials and lack of incidental issues, Keisler would be much better candidate.

In addition, if he does choose to recess appoint some judges, Bush needs to limit the number. The recess appointment of people other than Southwick and Keisler, both of whom have long records of being obstructed, could be viewed as an abuse of Bush's recess-appointment authority.

My guess is that, given that these are 'consensus' nominees, they are being held off until after people like Conrad or Keisler.

If Bush intends on sticking to the list, I think the nominations will be made in October or November.

in which the Dems are refusing to confirm any more Bush judges. ;-) Seriously though, is there any current COA nominee who is not blocked? It's sitting at 5 out of 5 isn't it?

Bush needs to be very careful about any judges he recess appoints in August. Those nominees will be excoriated and challenged by the Senate Dems. Potentially such an action could result in the Dems refusing to confirm any more Bush judges.

Since there's been some discussion about reforming the confirmation process here, I remembered this article:

If the Judicial Confirmation Process is Broken, Can a Statute Fix it? AARON-ANDREW P. BRUHL
University of Houston Law Center

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=920871

The article pasted below claims that Clinton appointed 377 judges, and that Bush will not come close to that figure. Anybody know off the top how many judges Bush has appointed to date?

A judicial showdown
Quin Hillyer
July 30, 2007 3:00 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/quin_hillyer/2007/07/a_judicial_show...

This will be the week in which Senate Republicans prove whether they have the courage to live up to their repeated promises to play rough on behalf of President George Bush's judicial nominees.

Many conservative activists have for years complained that the Senate GOP caucus has been rather feckless in the judicial confirmation wars. Two months ago, though, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott and others said they would bring the Senate to an utter standstill if Mississippi state court judge Leslie Southwick did not receive a full and fair vote on the Senate floor.

Bush has nominated Southwick to a seat on the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals - a seat for which the Senate has refused to confirm anybody during the entirety of the Bush presidency. First the Democrats filibustered a revered Mississippi jurist, Charles Pickering. Then they blocked attorney Michael Wallace. Now comes Southwick, a man who earned the highest rating from the American Bar Association and who, like Pickering before him, enjoys overwhelming bipartisan support in Mississippi.

The larger picture is that the Senate Democratic leadership has fought vociferously against every single white male from the south that Bush has nominated. Every time, the playbook is the same: Find some case, any case, where the nominee sided against a black person or a member of another "disadvantaged" class - regardless of the actual circumstances and law surrounding the case - and use it to smear the judge as being some sort of Neanderthal or racist.

Southwick seemed so well qualified and so moderate and upstanding that judiciary committee chairman Pat Leahy told Republicans he would ensure that Southwick got a vote on the Senate floor. Then the leftwing pressure groups jumped in, highlighting a single case from Southwick's long career as reason enough to block his appointment. In the case, Southwick joined a majority of the state appeals court to rule that state law did not require that a state employee be fired - disciplined, yes, but not fired - for use of a racial epithet against a fellow worker.

In issuing its ruling, the court strongly condemned the use of the epithet, but found that a severe-but-lesser penalty than dismissal was warranted by the applicable state laws.

Every neutral observer I can find has determined that the ruling was reasonable. National Journal's respected centrist legal analyst Stuart Taylor, fresh off a column siding with Democrats in the flap against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (proving again his lack of any bias in favor of the political right), writes this week that Southwick is "professionally well-qualified and personally admirable", and blasts the "scurrilous allegations that Southwick is a bigot".

Oh - and Southwick also is a courageous patriot, having volunteered for service in Iraq a few years ago when already in his 50s.

In short, looked at objectively, Southwick has everything going for him. Still, the Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee are standing firm in their determination to kill the Southwick nomination without letting it even reach the Senate floor. Senate Republicans, led by the not-particularly-partisan Arlen Specter, ratcheted up the pressure with floor speeches and press conferences last week. But they have not yet taken the available procedural steps to tie the Senate in knots until Southwick receives the full, fair Senate floor vote he deserves.

Senate Democrats have so effectively fought Bush judicial nominees that Bush won't even come close to successfully appointing the 377 judges that Bill Clinton did, even though Clinton faced a Senate majority of the opposite party for six of his eight years in office. Senate Republicans say they are determined not to let the estimable Southwick be another victim of the Democrats' attack machine. But Senate Republicans have talked big on judges before, with only mild success.

He nominated Roger Gregory for the 4th after the GOP had blocked him during the Clinton years and Clinton recess-appointed him with 3-4 weeks left in office.

He nominated Barrington Parker, a Democrat, for the 2nd.

The Dems blocked Susan Neilson for years and only allowed her through as she was on her deathbed - she served only three months. (BTW Is her replacement still blocked?)

You could argue Parker was a normal situation in that it's almost a given nominees for the 2nd will be liberal, but in any case when the Dems talk about "counts" Bush's number is inflated by at least two - Gregory should in effect count as one for Clinton rather than Bush, and Neilson shouldn't really count vs people who'll serve for decades.

Are there other examples to make the disparity of Clinton numbers vs Bush's even wider? (Not that we'd ever see such analysis when the MSM quotes Leahy's usual body count as proof of fairness.)

My unofficial judges count for Bush is 281.

107th - 100
108th - 104
109th - 52
110th - 25

With such a great disparity, why is there so much attention on the numbers of the last two years of a presidency? The overall numbers seem to be a better talking point on getting more judges confirmed.

Congressional Research Service slices and dices the historical nomination stats any way you want to look at them. Great place to look up Clinton's stats.

http://www.opencrs.com/rpts/RL31635_20040220.pdf

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Just like I feel that the Republicans are somewhat paying the price now for how they acted in the 106th Congress, I think the Republicans have to be careful now about recess-appointments. A flood of conservative recess-appointments in August could set a precedent for a future Democrat president. Say the Republicans during the 111th Congress are successful in blocking a slew of liberal judicial nominations made by a Dem president, would we want all that hard work undone by a massive set of presidential recess-appointments? That's why I think no one beyond Keisler and Southwick should be recess-appointed in the next five weeks.