Amy K. Matsui, Senior Counsel and Director of Women and the Courts

It’s the last week of August, and just as millions of kids around the country are zipping up their backpacks for the first time in many months, so too the Senate will be preparing to come back into session after Labor Day. Between the political conventions, religious holidays, and Senators’ desire to campaign in their states before the November elections, there’s not much time to actually conduct the people’s business in September. But there’s a lot to do.

One must-do priority is confirming the backlog of judicial nominees – and if longstanding Senate practices were followed, this could be accomplished quickly and easily. Right now, there are 18 nominees to federal district courts around the county who have been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and are simply waiting for a vote to be scheduled. It may come as a surprise if you’ve been watching Congress lately, but the Senate could confirm all of these nominees in a block, in a single scheduled vote. Indeed, as Senator Patrick Leahy, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has reminded us in recent months, the Senate routinely used to vote on groups of nominees, as many as 18 at a time. 

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Reid filed cloture in an attempt to schedule a confirmation vote on a nominee to a federal court of appeals, in an attempt to push back against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s declaration last month that confirmation votes would, especially on court of appeals nominations, grind to a virtual halt because of the elections (the ones that are being held over three months from now, yes). The kicker: the nominee, Robert Bacharach, nominated to an Oklahoma seat on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, has the full support of his Republican home-state senators. And he was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a bipartisan voice vote. And was rated unanimously well-qualified by the ABA -- unsurprisingly, given his ten years as a federal magistrate judge.