by Jeremy Leaming
A week after President Obama handily won re-election - and his party gained in the Senate - one might think the other party would finally understand that elections have consequences. For example, the president has a duty to appoint judges to the federal bench, and the Senate should be ready to provide some advice and consent, not obstructionism.
Since his first election, however, Senate Republicans have shown tremendous contempt for all things Obama, includi
ng the president’s selections to the federal bench. And the result has had devastating consequences for the judiciary. The bench has seen a historic number of vacancies, hovering, at times, near a hundred, many of them deemed judicial emergencies by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts of the federal bench. The ringleader of obstructionism in the Senate is its Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). (He famously said early in Obama’s first term that his party’s top priority was to ensure that Obama would be a one-termer. McConnell has now claimed Obama needs to become more moderate. It looks already as if the senator from Kentucky is going to ignore the president’s landslide victory, the majority of the American people and continue dwelling in a rightwing cocoon.)
He’s being prodded by the rightwing activists who are not ready, likely never will be, to accept the 2012 election results. They’re peddling myths like declaring the Senate does not address judicial nominations during lame-duck sessions or that Obama’s nominees can surely wait a tad longer until he is sworn in for a second term in January.
Then there’s the National Review Online’ s Ed Whelan, long obsessed with keeping the federal bench tilted as far to the right as possible. So, as Media Matters’ Sergio Muñoz points out in this blog post, Whelan is now urging Senate Republicans to stick with obstructionism. Citing a recent NRO piece by Whelan, Muñoz writes that he is calling on continued obstruction of current judicial nominations and expand it “to any and all Supreme Court nominees.”
emerged from this week’s election. Fredrickson immediately pointed out that courts had played a large role in the election, including several court decisions on early voting rules and voter ID laws. And CAC’s Doug Kendall noted the strength of the Voting Rights Act played a large part in getting favorable rulings on voting issues leading up to the election.
the federal bench, many of them deemed 
ent Obama’s judicial nominations has been ongoing since the start of his first term, and the federal bench has a record number of vacancies, more than 80. Sen. Reid had called for unanimous consent to secure confirmation votes for 17 district court nominations. “There are places around the country where we have judges who are tremendously overworked on these cases,” Reid said..jpg)
The “partisan intensity” surrounding the Senate confirmation process of judicial nominees “makes the judiciary look politicized when it is not” and “has to stop,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy said during an