Senators Grassley and McConnell Make Misleading Statements about Judicial Confirmations

Prior to the Senate's long-overdue confirmation of Third Circuit nominee Patty Shwartz (who waited 550 days for a vote), Senator Grassley (R-IA), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, made misleading statements about confirmations of judicial nominees.

Senator Grassley

Specifically, he cherry-picked the time period for confirmations in an attempt to evade the fact that President Obama has had far fewer judges confirmed than President George W. Bush at a comparable point in his presidency. He said:

"Today the Senate will consider the 10th judicial nomination this year. . . . At this point in 2005, and that was the beginning of President Bush’s second term, comparable for what we’re talking about for President Obama, the Senate had confirmed zero judicial nominees. Let me repeat, at this point in 2005, the Senate had confirmed not 10 , not 4, not even 1 judicial nominee, so that comes out to be zero."

Minority Leader McConnell

Following the vote, Minority Leader McConnell (R-KY) repeated the statement almost verbatim:

"We just today confirmed the 10th judicial nomination of President Obama's second term. Today. The 10th judicial nomination of President Obama's second term. At this point in President Bush's second term, he got zero judges. None."

Ten confirmations compared with zero confirmations sounds bad. But 202 confirmations compared with 181 confirmations sounds even worse—and that's the actual number of Bush and Obama confirmations at a comparable point in their presidencies. That comes out to 21 fewer confirmations for Obama.

Grassley and McConnell’s larger point about fairness would be even stronger if the Senate had confirmed 96% of President Obama’s district court nominees—the percentage of President Bush’s district court nominees who had been confirmed at a comparable point. Instead, the Senate’s confirmed only 85% of President Obama’s nominees. Had Grassley, McConnell, and their colleagues allowed Obama to match Bush’s record on this front, the Senate would have confirmed another 19 judges, making the two presidents’ overall confirmation numbers almost exactly even.

As it happens, there are exactly 19 district court nominees pending in the Senate right now. Unfortunately, Republicans have delayed the 13 nominees on the Senate floor, who have been waiting for over a month, and 6 nominees who are pending in committee. Given the Senators’ evident concern with fairness, you would think that they would at least allow immediate votes for the 13 nominees pending on the floor, all but one of whom were reported out of the Judiciary Committee unanimously. You would think.

Not that we'd ever say "we told you so," but ...

... remember how, on Friday, when commenting on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell filibustering his own bill, AFJ President Nan Aron said: “If we didn’t know better we’d think Sen. McConnell was moonlighting as a writer for The Daily Show or The Colbert Report”? And remember how on Twitter we said people should watch the self-filibuster before The Daily Show got hold of it?

Well ...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mitch McConnell's Self-Filibuster
www.thedailyshow.com
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Of course, there are some very serious issues behind all this; we have an overview on our new resource page on Senate rules reform.  And there's much more at the website of Fix the Senate Now

Our take on Mitch McConnell's "self-filibuster"

AFJ released this statement on a spectacle that was absurd even by U.S. Senate standards:

AFJ: McCONNELL “SELF-FILIBUSTER” ILLUSTRATES HOW GOP

TURNS IT INTO “WEAPON OF MASS OBSTRUCTION”

WASHINGTON, D.C., Dec. 7: The spectacle of the Minority Leader of the United States Senate filibustering his own bill perfectly illustrates the extent to which the filibuster has been abused for purely partisan purposes, according to the Alliance for Justice.

Yesterday, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) introduced a bill to allow the President to raise the federal debt ceiling on his own authority.  The idea was to show that Democrats didn’t have the votes to pass such a measure.  But when it turned out the Democrats did have the votes, McConnell was in a bind.  His only way out: filibuster his own bill.

“If we didn’t know better we’d think Sen. McConnell was moonlighting as a writer for The Daily Show or The Colbert Report,” said Nan Aron, President of the Alliance for Justice.  “But Sen. McConnell’s theater-of-the-absurd actually illustrates an extremely serious problem: the paralysis in the Senate caused by Republican abuse of the filibuster.

“The filibuster was intended to be used in extreme circumstances, where fundamental principles were at stake,” said Aron.  “But Senate Republicans have turned it into a weapon of mass obstruction to bring the business of the Senate to a halt. 

“Nowhere is this more apparent than in our federal courts.   As we document in our recent report, Senate Republicans repeatedly have abused the filibuster to block votes on nominees for federal judgeships – including noncontroversial nominees with broad bipartisan support.  That’s led to unconscionable delays and severe hardship for hundreds of thousands of Americans, forced to wait months, sometimes years to fight for their rights in court.

“That’s why it’s time to ring down the curtain on the theater of the absurd and enact serious reforms to Senate rules.”