Litigation

Some Judicial Nominations Returned to Obama

By Peter Hardin

The political clock is ticking for confirmation votes this year on a number of President Obama’s judicial nominees.

The Senate, now on recess, has sent back to the White House five of the more contentious nominations including that of federal appeals nominee Goodwin Liu. The nomination of Liu, a Berkeley law professor, may be the most controversial of Obama’s judicial appointments, according to a NPR report.

You can learn more about Liu from Gavel Grab; Republicans have blocked his nomination for months. Assuming the nomination is re-submitted by the White House when the Senate returns in September, its future is quite uncertain. Overall, about 100 federal judgeships are waiting to be filled.

In a separate NPR piece, Ron Elving examines recent national issues of great importance and divisiveness that have simmered over in federal courtrooms, including gay marriage and immigration law, and he suggests that for now, at least, some federal judges have risen into the spotlight from their more typically obscure benches. This may also bear on the partisanship in the Senate on judicial nominations, he says:

“[W]e are clearly heading into the most significant round of state-federal confrontations we have seen since the 1960s. And that struggle has already been joined in courtrooms around the country, where it will largely be fought.

“Small wonder then that Republicans in the Senate have made resistance to the judicial nominees of the new president such a salient element of their mission in these past 18 months.”

Some leaders in the civil rights community, meanwhile, have grown frustrated over the delays for numerous judicial nominees and have urged Senate action, according to a statement by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Republicans also have blocked Obama’s nomination of federal magistrate Edward Chen to a U.S. district court in San Francisco. Both Liu and Chen have won approval by the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Republicans have stood in the way of their getting confirmation votes on the Senate floor, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Appearing before the American Bar Association House of Delegates in San Francisco, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke about the contentious confirmation road for recent Supreme Court nominees. “May the Senate one day return to the collegial and bipartisan spirit that Justice [Stephen G.] Breyer and I had the good fortune to experience,? she said, according to an ABA Journal article.

Full post as published by The Gavel on August 10, 2010 (boomark / email).