There are thirteen U.S. District Courts of Appeal. Some are big and some are small. The Ninth Circuit, which covers the West Coast, serves 61 million people. The DC Circuit represents about 600,000. That’s a technicality, though, because the DC Circuit covers the Federal Government and therefore really serves the whole country. The DC Circuit is considered to be second in importance to the Supreme Court, and its Justices are often promoted to the Supreme Court. For these reasons, the Republicans refused to confirm any nominees to the DC Circuit during Obama’s entire first term, even as vacancies grew to four.
Their justification for inaction was that the DC Circuit isn’t that busy and it doesn’t need any more judges. I can’t say whether that argument has any merit or not, but the number of seats assigned to each circuit is decided by Congress, and if they’ve assigned too many to DC the thing to do is to change the law.
As it stands, Congress has assigned 11 seats to the DC Circuit. Three still remain unfilled. Of the eight sitting judges, three were nominated by Clinton, three were nominated by Dubya, one was nominated by Poppy, and one was nominated by Obama. So, the court is split evenly at the moment, but if Obama fills the vacancies there will be an 7-4 advantage of Democratic nominees over Republicans ones.
The GOP doesn’t want that to happen. But Harry Reid is setting them up. As part of his effort to break the obstruction of nominees in general, he plans to introduce the nominations for all three vacancies and then dare the Republicans to filibuster them. If they do, he’ll go nuclear and (try to) take away their right to filibuster nominations. Then Reid will follow up with the nominations for Labor, the EPA, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and possibly vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board.
But none of this will happen until after the immigration reform bill is dispensed with.
Reid’s been so weak lately I’ll believe it when I see it, but if it happens, it’s popcorn-time.
But none of this will happen until after the immigration reform bill is dispensed with.
So will that help people like Antonio Vanegas?:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15066/low_wage_federal_worker_faces_deportation_after_striking
_foxs_workplace_hun/
No, probably not. It might if his deportation proceedings are slow enough. But this bill is going to have a devil of a time passing the House in a form that will help anyone.
That’s just the problem. When is the House going to vote on it? Because Reid can’t nuke the filibuster until after the House votes, or else they’d certainly vote the immigration bill down, just on spite.
pretty sure you meant “country” and not “county”.
thx, fixed.
Interesting. What are your current expectations re. the immigration bill?
We know that it has four Republican votes, and Hatch could make five. That would be enough if all 55 Dems voted for it, but I don’t think that will happen. I am worried about the Montana senators and Heitkamp in North Dakota. McConnell says he supports it, but that probably comes with caveats.
In order for it to pass the House, I think they need a big number in the Senate. Right now, I cannot predict a big number. It looks like somewhere between 58 and 63.
But, with a bill like this, the support could flood in once it becomes clear that it has defeated the filibuster.
Thanks.
Is the idea that a big number in the Senate gives Boehner cover for violating the Hastert Rule, and it passes the House with more Dem votes then Rep?
That’s kind of the idea but not really. The process in the House is still unclear. Boehner is basically a wine-sipping baboon, so he has never had control of the process.
Remember, we’ve had a dynamic in Washington for years now where it’s the Dems agaisnt the GOP, and maybe a couple of centrists would cross the aisle to make things happen. We haven’t had a big bill where there was significant Republican support. If we were to get it in the Senate, it would basically mess up the GOP playbook for how to oppose the Democrats.
Suddenly, you have a dozen or more Republicans going on television to praise something that the president wants to sign. It’s not that it gives Boehner permission to break the Hastert Rule so much as it actually wins support from the base and then the rank-and-file, so that the caucus is split in the House.
I mean there is breaking the Hastert Rule and then there is obliterating the Hastert Rule. Boehner is going to want to hold a vote. He doesn’t want that vote to be totally lopsided.
I can see some Republicans and some of the wavering Dems hold their noses and take the political hit that comes with voting for immigration reform in order to pass an immigration reform bill, but if it’s doomed in the House anyway, why would they bother?
Different constituencies, mainly. To win statewide in an increasing number of states the GOP has to do better with minorities. Look at Nevada.
The house seats are drawn safe, so a primary is the main threat.
If you are a safe Republican senator, you may still care about being in the minority and shifting blame for failure to the House is appealing.
If it becomes a law, great! if it doesn’t then it’s the House’s fault.
wiki indicates that Bush Jr had 4 nominees confirmed to the DC Circuit, and that all these occurred in Bush’s first 5 years or so. (Roberts resigned.) Repubs had no concern about packing that court with “conservative” activists, naturally. Obama is simply doing exactly what Bush did, and what most 2 term prezes do.
This is very important since the senate was confirming terrible Bushco appeals nominees up until late June 2008(!). Since we aren’t going to get any more useful legislation out of having a Dem prez, we should at least have his nominees confirmed at the level Dubya did.
Of course there is no precedent for what today’s Repub nihilists are pulling with executive nominees, a truly outrageous scandal which the corporate media daily ignores.
If Reid and his handwringing Dems permit the current fucking over of prez nominees by McConnell, we will have largely wasted a 2 term Dem prez, solely to prolong the doomed filibuster until the next Repub prez is elected.
Mustn’t forget:
Senate Democrats were mostly stupid enough to think that if they confirmed GWB’s lower court nominees that GOP Senators would play nice with the next DEM POTUS. Still they did block a number of higher court nominees. That was the genesis of Trent Lott’s “nuclear option” threat.
One other factor, when DEM Senators balked at a GWB nominee or were slow to confirm, he and his co-horts screamed loudly in public about the Democratic bullies that weren’t respecting GWB’s authority.
Boo:
If Harry does nuke the filibuster for Presidential appointments, will Obama nominate Halligan and Liu again? After all, we don’t need centrist on the D.C. Circuit(which is what the 3 Obama nominees are).
After all, we don’t need centrist on the D.C. Circuit
I’ve seen some studies of Supreme Court voting patterns, and the difference between “centrist” Democratic appointments and “progressive” Democratic appointments is almost entirely nonexistent when it comes to politically-loaded cases.
The SCOTUS has become as polarized as the rest of the country. The liberals vote with the liberals, the conservatives vote with the conservatives, and the difference between Kagan and Ginsburg (or between Thomas and Kennedy) is vanishingly small. On cases that turn on intricate legal questions and don’t have a big political cause attached, there is plenty of aisle-crossing, but on the cases that political activists care about, not so much.
I don’t know if this is true at the Circuit court level, but I would suspect it is.
I think Liu is now on the California Supreme Court.
Honestly, Reid (and other Senate Dems, but especially Reid) have threatened meaningful change to the filibuster rules so many times that I won’t believe it unless it happens, and maybe not even then. His threats really have very little credibility any longer.
The Senate has been effectively paralyzed for five years now, causing enormous damage to the country in the process, and Congressional approval ratings have been hovering around the win total of an average NFL team for most of that time. If Reid and the Democratic leadership were genuinely concerned about it, they would have done something long ago. Why would they now?
Because they apparently have the votes now.
If Reid and the Democratic leadership were genuinely concerned about it, they would have done something long ago.
That just isn’t how the Senate works.
it’s how the House works. In the Senate, a few holdouts can thwart the Majority Leader.
Why wait until after immigration reform? This move is way overdue and has a much higher impact than immigration reform which is inevitable.
Not to be overly pedantic, but they are the U.S. Courts of Appeal, not the U.S. District Courts of Appeal. They can be called the “Circuit Courts of Appeal” informally. But the U.S. District Courts are the level down, and at last count, there were 89 districts.