U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit

by Jeremy Leaming

The misconduct complaint lodged against federal appeals court Judge Edith H. Jones is now pending before the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, reports The Times-Picayune.

A coalition of civil liberties groups, including the Austin NAACP and the Texas Civil Rights Project, recently filed a complaint against Jones, who is based in Houston and a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, alleging she made racist comments during a Federalist Society event earlier this year. Affidavits in the complaint, said that Judge Jones stated that African-Americans and Latinos are predisposed to violence. According to other affidavits she allegedly said, “Mexicans would prefer to be on death row in the United States than in prison in Mexico.”

Allegedly Jones (pictured) also said cited her religious beliefs in handling death penalty sentences. According to an affidavit, the judge allegedly said that sentencing a person to death gives them the time and opportunity to reconcile with God. In this post, ThinkProgress centers on some of the judge’s wobbly opinion in a sexual harassment lawsuit and erratic behavior on the bench.

The Fifth Circuit’s jurisdiction includes Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

After news of the complaint surfaced, U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) said, “The alleged statements, if true, demonstrate personal racial and religious bias as well as questionable legal analysis. These biases are incredibly inappropriate for a sitting jurist at any level, let alone a former chief judge on one of the highest level Article III Courts of Appeal,” TPM reported.

The Judicial Code of Conduct defines misconduct, in part, as “discriminating against litigants or attorneys on account of race, ethnicity, sex, or other legally protected attribute” or “engaging in partisan political activity or making inappropriately partisan statements ….”

by Jeremy Leaming

President Obama is not shying away from a high-profile nominations battle with the U.S. Senate’s rabid obstructionists. In announcing today three nominations to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the president is taking on senators, such as Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who have mounted a concerted effort to block him from bringing balance to the D.C. Circuit, which currently has a strong rightward tilt.

Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is arguing that the D.C. Circuit, which hears myriad cases involving weighty constitutional issues, has enough judges and does not need anymore. He is pushing a bill to chop the number of seats on the 11-member Court to eight. The bill has little chance of enactment because it likely could not pass the Senate. But that’s not the point. The point, as Judith Schaeffer of the Constitutional Accountability Center has noted, is to provide cover for Grassley’s partners in obstruction. The obstructionists will have difficulty arguing that the president’s nominees are ideological extremists, but they will take Grassley’s line that the D.C. Circuit has plenty of judges for its caseload.

But Grassley is pushing an outrageously ludicrous line, one that’s also laden with hypocrisy. Grassley had no problem helping Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush place judges on the D.C. Circuit, which included the far right Judge Janice Rogers Brown.

Patricia Wald, who served on the D.C. Circuit for 20 years, including five as its chief judge, wrote earlier this year that the Court hears some of the weightiest and time-consuming constitutional and national security cases of any of the federal appeals court circuits. She also noted that the D.C. Circuit’s caseload has grown since G.W. Bush’s administration, when Grassley was striving to confirm nominations to that bench. “The number of pending cases per judge has grown from 119 in 2005 to 188 today,” she wrote.

In announcing nominations for the D.C. Circuit’s three vacant seats, Obama noted his responsibility in nominating “qualified men and women to serve as judges” and Congress’s responsibility in the matter. Congress has a “constitutional duty to promptly consider judicial nominees for confirmation.” The president nominated Patricia Ann Millett, a longtime appellate attorney, Nina Pillard, a law professor at Georgetown Law Center and Judge Robert Wilkins, who is serving on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. 

Obama noted that during his first term senators too often failed to provide consideration of his nominees. Indeed, despite what mainstream reporters would have us believe, the battle over judicial nominations has only gotten more pitched during Obama’s presidency. Vacancies on the bench spiked during his first term and have remained hovering around 80 since.