Senator Reid Files Cloture on 17 Judicial Nominees

Last night, Senator Harry Reid took one giant step forward towards clearing the backlog of judicial nominations. As you’ll recall, the Senate’s recent track record on confirming judges is less than stellar: twenty nominees were left waiting for votes at the end of last year, and the Senate has only confirmed 7 judges in 2012. With 83 vacancies in the federal judiciary, 35 of which are judicial emergencies, what possible justification could there be for leaving twenty-two nominees waiting for votes? Just ask Senator Lee of Utah, who has flat-out stated that he is holding up judicial (and executive branch) nominations in retaliation for President Obama’s recess appointments to the Consumer Protection board and the NLRB in January…

But I digress. So what has Senator Reid done to move nominations forward? Yesterday evening, he filed cloture petitions on 17 district court nominations. It will be timely to start voting on the first of these petitions, for the nomination of Gina Groh to a district court seat in West Virginia that has been vacant since 2006, on Wednesday morning. After that, the rest of the 17 will be taken up one at a time.  If the cloture vote is successful, then the Senate will schedule a yes-or-no vote on the nomination.*

Early indications from the Republican leadership in the Senate are that they intend to vote against cloture – since we clearly haven’t waited long enough for the Senate to get the job done on judges. What can you do? Contact your Senators and tell them to vote in favor of cloture on all 17 nominees, and end the wait for the 160 million people currently living in states with judicial vacancies.

*Arcane procedural footnote: if the cloture petition on a nomination succeeds, any Senator can insist that 30 hours pass before a yes-or-no vote occurs, as Senator Rand Paul did on the nomination of now-Judge Adalberto Jordan to an Eleventh Circuit seat in Florida a few weeks ago. If that happens, it will take nearly three weeks to get yes-or-no votes on all 17 nominees.