With one of the four seats on the U.S District Court in Delaware vacant since March 2009 and a second retirement pending, the judicial district has had no choice but to outsource its criminal caseload to other courts to comply with the Speedy Trial Act, ACS Executive Director Caroline Fredrickson told The American Prospect's Jamelle Bouie.
This is just the latest example of what Fredrickson called a "fundamental breakdown in the judicial confirmation process," Bouie writes in a column about the judicial vacancy crisis.
Since President Barack Obama took office last year, the number of judicial emergencies has more than doubled, and this has "disastrous consequences for the legal system," Bouie writes.
Bouie blames Senate Republicans for having turned the usual legislative deference to the president on its head and turning the judicial confirmation process into a "battleground," but he also blames President Obama for not nominating more judges.
"The consequences of an understaffed federal judiciary are hard to overstate," he writes. Bouie continues:
ainous Switzerland could discriminate against other European countries' milk products by enacting the facially neutral law that it will only buy milk from cows that graze in meadows above 9,000 feet.) Perhaps that is inevitable in a case that involves preemption doctrine, state contract principles of unconscionability, and forced arbitration. But as complicated as the legal argument in AT&T v. Concepcion may have been in the Court today, it was perhaps just as impenetrable as what is at the core of the case: the lengthy, legalese-heavy, fine print that many of us never read in our cell phone contracts (or employment contracts, health insurance agreements, or other contracts that consumers are effectively forced to sign these days in order to obtain goods and services). And in many of those contracts-as in the contract the Concepcions signed with AT&T-the fine print will require that all disputes be resolved through arbitration, not through the court system, while banning class actions. Accordingly, the Court in Concepcion could decide whether individuals can band together to hold big corporations accountable for misconduct-including discrimination in the workplace and widespread consumer fraud in the marketplace-or whether corporations can get away with wrongdoing so long as they do it on an individually small scale, making individual claims too small to pursue.
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When a child is born to an unmarried U.S. citizen living abroad, the parent's ability to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child turns on this question: Was the child born to a U.S. citizen father, or mother?