Now the full Senate needs to vote on on Pillard nomination for D.C. Circuit

Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron issued the following statement in response to the vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee today on President Obama’s nomination of Nina Pillard to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit:

We commend the majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee for supporting President Obama’s nomination of Nina Pillard for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.  We are disappointed, but not surprised, that all of the committee’s Republicans chose to put politics ahead of qualifications and opposed this outstanding nominee.

The American people have good reason to be fed up with Republican obstruction and delay.  They demand and deserve courts that have enough judges to administer justice fairly and swiftly.  Americans are entitled to a swift yes-or-no vote by the full Senate on Nina Pillard and President Obama’s other judicial nominees.

Read more about Nina Pillard in this previous post to Justice Watch

D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Nina Pillard: 10 things you should know

On June 4, 2013, President Obama nominated Georgetown Law Professor Nina Pillard to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Over the course of her law career, Professor Pillard has won historic Supreme Court victories, and served two tours as a high-level government lawyer at the Department of Justice. She has spent 15 years teaching at Georgetown Law, where she is co-director of Georgetown’s Supreme Court Institute. As the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to vote on her nomination tomorrow, here are 10 things you might not know about Professor Pillard:

1. She helped open VMI to women. Professor Pillard wrote the briefs in United States v. Virginia, a case originally filed by the George H.W. Bush Administration. Professor Pillard’s arguments persuaded the Supreme Court to open the Virginia Military Institute to women, ending one of the last male-only admissions policies at a state college. Read an op-ed columns about Professor Pillard from a VMI alumna and from the superintendent of VMI when women first were admitted.

2. She protected the Family and Medical Leave Act. Professor Pillard argued Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs before the Supreme Court, alongside Department of Justice  officials from the George W. Bush administration. Their defense of the Family and Medical Leave Act successfully vindicated a state employee’s right to take unpaid leave to care for his ill wife. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion.

3. She has bipartisan support—including from top Republican former Justice Department officials. Professor Pillard’s impressive record, integrity, and impartiality have earned her the support of top Department of Justice officials in previous Republican administrations. President George W. Bush’s Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh and former FBI Director William Sessions both wrote personal letters to the Senate Judiciary Committee endorsing Professor Pillard for the DC Circuit.

4. She has argued or briefed dozens of cases before the Supreme Court. Over the course of her career, Professor Pillard has litigated at all levels and throughout the country, from trial court to the Supreme Court.

5. If confirmed to the D.C. Circuit, Nina Pillard would be only the sixth woman to serve on that court in its 120-year history.

6. She assisted the American Bar Association in concluding that  Samuel Alito was “well qualified” for the U.S. Supreme Court. Because of Professor Pillard’s unbiased approach to the law, she was asked to chair an ABAcommittee that reviewed Judge Samuel Alito’s writings, in the context of his nomination to the Supreme Court. Armed with the review by Professor Pillard’s committee, the Standing Committee unanimously gave Judge Alito its highest rating of “Well Qualified.”

7. Professor Pillard has substantial expertise in matters affecting law enforcement. Professor Pillard served two tours at the U.S. Department of Justice and has repeatedly defended and advised law enforcement officials. Her expertise has earned her the endorsement of the International Union of Police Associations and more than two dozen top attorneys in law enforcement and national security.

8. She’s a beloved professor. Over the last 15 years, Nina Pillard has distinguished herself as a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. One of her favorite classes to teach is Civil Procedure, which covers the crucial role that fair process plays in the American legal system.

9. Professor Pillard serves as a Co-Director of Georgetown University’s Supreme Court Institute. Here, she prepares lawyers for argument on a pro bono, first-come basis, without regard to which side they represent. Over the past term, the Institute prepared lawyers on one or both sides of every case heard by the Supreme Court.

10) Professor Pillard has devoted considerable time and energy to mentoring others throughout her career. During her years at Georgetown, she has mentored countless law students.  As a college student, moreover, she mentored low-income girls through a Big Sister program.  In addition, she served on the Board of Friends of the Double Discovery Center at Columbia College, which works with low-income and first-generation-college youth to ensure academic skills building, high school graduation, college entrance and completion, and responsible adulthood.

You can help get Nina Pillard confirmed.  Click here to email your Senators. 

Read more about Nina Pillard.

The D.C. Circuit workload: Senator Blumenthal sets the record straight

Watch Sen. Blumenthal discuss the caseload of the D.C. Circuit:



On July 24th, Cornelia “Nina” Pillard appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on her nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Senate Republicans have long attempted to obstruct any and all of President Obama’s nominees to the D.C. Circuit, making him the first president in recent history to have no nominees confirmed to the court in his first term, and only recently allowing Sri Srinivasan a confirmation to the 8th seat on the 11-seat court.

Ranking Member Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) used the hearing as an opportunity to repeat a long-refuted argument: the D.C. Circuit is underworked, and so rather than confirm President Obama’s nominees to vacant seats, the remaining open judgeships should be stripped from the court in an effort that has been called “reverse court packing.” In fact, the Senate, with Republican support, has quickly and unanimously confirmed judges to the 8th and 10th Circuits, each of which has fewer cases per active and authorized judge. Grassley, attempting to shift the goalposts, is now arguing for a new measure: filed and resolved cases per active judge. Grassley even solicited anonymous support for his position from D.C. Circuit judges.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), chairing the hearing, swiftly refuted Grassley’s transparent effort to shift the focus of the Circuit’s workload. As a former attorney general and U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, Sen. Blumenthal knows from personal experience that not all filings are created equal; cases vary remarkably in their complexity and the amount of time required to resolve. Indeed, the statistics Sen. Grassley cites – that the D.C. Circuit has fewer filings but higher active pending cases per judge – lend support to the reality that the cases heard by the D.C. Circuit are far more complex and time-consuming than those before other circuits. That is why the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts continues to recommend that the D.C. Circuit maintain 11 judgeships. Sen. Blumenthal came prepared with public statements from current and former D.C. Circuit judges – including Republican appointees John Roberts, Laurence Silberman, and Douglas Ginsburg – attesting to the increasing and highly complex workload of the nation’s second most important court.

Senate Republicans should stop trying to distort reality in their efforts to block President Obama’s highly qualified D.C. Circuit nominees. All three nominees should be allowed up-or-down votes without delay. We look forward to these distinguished legal luminaries taking the bench so that the D.C. Circuit can do its work with a full complement of judges.

Nan Aron on "The Broken Senate"

This is AFJ President Nan Aron's statement for today's forum at the National Press Club called "Fixing the Broken Senate: Restoring Democracy and Fixing the Filibuster."  

 ●Watch video of the forum at www.afj.org 
 ● Read more about Senate rules reform

Alliance for Justice is very pleased to be a part of this discussion about the “Broken Senate.” I feel like we’re coming to the end of the fifth season of a bad reality show.

Nan Aron

But what’s happening in the Senate is not fiction. It’s very real. The abuse of the filibuster has become a threat to the proper functioning of the government and to public faith in the institution of the Senate.  A recent poll by The Economist put the approval rate of Congress at nine percent. That’s incredible, but not really surprising.  It does make me wonder who those nine percent are. Family members? Campaign consultants?

It’s deplorable that the American people have so little regard for a crucial part of our government. It’s unhealthy for our democracy. And I don’t think there is any question that at least part of the problem has been the rampant misuse of the filibuster in the Senate, which has led to stalemate and gridlock in spite of the enormous problems the country now faces.

Let me be clear about something: The filibuster has a legitimate role when used responsibly. But we have entered an era of unprecedented abuse of rules and traditions, which is forcing the Senate to the brink of drastic action. The filibuster traditionally has been used to allow a minority to make a principled stand on matters of enormous and unusual importance.  It forces the process to slow down and helps ensure that all voices are heard. It’s a signal that something of significance is at stake. But that’s not what’s happening now.

This is the crucial point to understand.  As the motivation behind the filibuster has changed and its frequency increased, its legitimacy has declined. The fights over President Obama’s judicial nominees, for instance, are not ideological in any real sense. The president has gone out of his way to nominate men and women from the legal and political mainstream. Who could honestly say that the filibuster of Caitlin Halligan was some kind of titanic ideological fight?

Today’s filibusters are just crass politics. They reflect a desire to block the president’s agenda at every turn and feed the insatiable need of a hyper-partisan political base for endless obstruction. We’re in an era where one side believes cooperation is a dirty word—or an invitation to a primary challenge. When that intransigent attitude is paired with a procedural weapon as potent as the filibuster, gridlock is the result.  And that’s what makes the situation different today from what it has been in the past. And that’s why the nuclear option is back on the table.


Serious talk about changing the rules has been reborn because the filibuster has evolved from a                            
targeted tool to a weapon of indiscriminate disruption. The entire legislative process is now held captive to this threat. We’ve gotten to the point where just the threat of a filibuster is enough to derail the Senate. The abuse of the process has created a de facto threshold of 60 votes for action—a supermajority requirement for everyday business that can be found nowhere in the Constitution.

It’s important to remember that the problem isn’t just that bills and nominations with clear majorities are stopped, but that many nominations are never made and bills are never proposed, even though they could achieve a simple majority if they were given a chance. There is an invisible price for gridlock that the public never sees.

Obviously, the first test will come in the next few days when cloture petitions are expected to be filed on a series of executive branch nominees—Richard Cordray, Tom Perez, Gina McCarthy, and nominees for the National Labor Relations Board. What happens to these highly qualified nominees will set the tone for the rest of this Congress. If Republicans continue their current behavior and prevent final votes, then the choices will be narrowed to two options: allow crucial agencies that deal with hugely important issues to be left leaderless or reform the rules to permit up-or-down votes.

But the battle over executive nominees is just the beginning. The next big fight looming later this summer is over the President’s three nominees to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.  This is a case of the Republicans engaging in what will be a kind of Group Filibuster, where they don’t even pretend to care about the qualifications or ideologies of the individual nominees.  They just don’t want anyone appointed by President Obama to this crucial court no matter who they are.

Senator Grassley has complained that the President is trying to “pack the court,” as if filling vacant judgeships is some kind of unprecedented power grab. Republicans pretend to be outraged that the president has sent names forward for empty seats on the 11-member D.C. Circuit--just like every other president has done since the Grover Cleveland administration. This would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so serious.

Of course, we know why the Republicans will threaten to filibuster Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard, and Robert Wilkins. The D.C. Circuit is the federal appeals court that most closely oversees the actions of federal agencies on topics like the environment, consumer protections, workers’ rights, banking regulations, and other vital issues. Those are the same issues, by the way, that are at stake in the current executive nominations fights.  In some ways, the two big summer battles over executive and judicial nominations are really one big fight over the future of the country. Fair enough. But the question is, will the Senate be permitted to bring these issues to a final vote on the merits, or will procedural hurdles be erected to prevent democracy from functioning.

So at some point in the next several months, when the three DC Circuit nominees reach the floor, the Senate will have to make another set of choices, just like the ones it will start to face next week on executive nominations. Either accept the obstructionism of a hyper-partisan minority or change the rules to allow the President and the Senate to do the jobs the Constitution demands of them.

For those who care about our democracy and the courts, the choice is easy.

The American people are saying enough is enough. The time for reform is rapidly approaching.