Sen. Patrick Leahy

by Jeremy Leaming

The Senate confirmed three federal judges today, taking an incremental step toward addressing the high number of vacancies besetting the federal bench.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy emphasized the slight improvement of the situation, noting that only “three of the 26 judicial nominations reported favorably by the Judiciary Committee” received action today.

Following the three confirmations, Leahy (pictured) said, “This is an area where the Senate must come together to address the serious judicial vacancies crisis on Federal courts around the country that has persisted for well over two years. We can and must do better for the nearly 170 million Americans being made to suffer by these unnecessary Senate delays.”

Before the Senate confirmed Robert Scola Jr. to the federal district court in the Southern District of Florida, Mark Hornak to a federal seat in the Western District of Pennsylvania, and Robert Mariana to the federal district court in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Leahy, as he has done on numerous occasions, called for an end to Republican-led obstruction of the president’s judicial selections.

Leahy noted that former President George W. Bush’s judicial nominations did not face similar obstruction.

“At this juncture in President Bush’s administration the Senate had confirmed 163 Federal circuit and district court judges, and the vacancy rate was down to five percent, with 46 vacancies,” Leahy said. “By contrast confirmations of President Obama’s Federal circuit and district court nominees total only 109, and judicial vacancies are now nearly twice as high with a vacancy rate of over 10 percent.”

During his floor remarks, Leahy also noted that Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. have all publicly expressed concern about the increasingly contentious nominations process. Leahy also cited recent letters sent to Senate leaders from American Bar Association President Wm. T. (Bill) Robinson III urging more cooperation on moving judicial nominations forward. Robinson’s letters to the Senate leaders are available here.

Tapped blogger Jamelle Bouie, citing commentary from The Washington Post’s Al Kamen about the difficulty of advancing judicial nominations during  presidential election years, notes that “Republicans have a strategic interest in denying the administration’s judicial nominees, even if they are acceptable to most Republican senators. If President Obama loses his bid for re-election, then the incoming Republican president has the chance to fill additional judicial vacancies, especially if a Republican-led Senate ends the filibuster, or if Democrats choose to follow the usual playbook and cooperate with Republican leaders.”

For more information and analysis on the effort to fill federal court vacancies, visit JudicialNominations.org.

This post is part of an ACSblog Constitution Week Symposium. By Doug Kendall, President, and Judith Schaeffer, Vice President, Constitutional Accountability Center  

As ACS members know, our Constitution is under attack from tea partiers and other self-professed “constitutional conservatives” who have claimed the document as their own and distorted it to support their ideological agenda. Over the past two years, they have made increasingly extreme, and in some cases absurd, claims about our Nation’s charter. They started with calls to repeal a number of Amendments, including the part of the 14th Amendment that protects citizenship at birth. They progressed to claims that Social Security, Medicare, and portions of the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional. It’s gotten to the point where it seems that many in the tea party believe the entire 20th Century was unconstitutional. Talk about a bridge to the 21st Century!  The tea party movement seems to want to build a bridge back to the colonial era and the Articles of Confederation.

There is no greater threat to progressive values than this effort to make progress itself unconstitutional. This week, Constitutional Accountability Center and our partner organizations, including the Center for American Progress and People For the American Way Foundation, launched a coordinated effort  -- Constitutional Progressives -- to take our Constitution back and rebut the constitutional fairy tales being peddled by tea party leaders. Our greatest assets in doing so are the text and history of the Constitution itself.

Constitutional Progressives celebratethe Framers for creating the best and most durable form of government in world history, but believe the Constitution today is better than the document ratified in 1789.  Generations of Americans have made our country and our Constitution “more perfect” by ratifying Amendments that have eliminated slavery, protected liberty and equality, expanded the powers of the federal government, and secured voting rights for every adult citizen in America.   

This story of constitutional improvement should inspire all Americans, and we’re asking people across the political spectrum to join Constitutional Progressives by signing the “Whole Constitution Pledge” --  a pledge to support the entire Constitution, including the Amendments adopted over the last 220 years. The Pledge can be signed on line, here. More than 15,000 people across the country have already signed. We’ve made a similar call to all Members of Congress, urging them on Constitution Day to reaffirm their constitutional oath of office -- their pledge to support the whole Constitution, not just the parts they like or find ideologically convenient.