Twelve Judges Who Received Unanimous Judiciary Committee Support Still Haven’t Received A Senate Vote

One in ten federal judgeships are currently vacant, a reality that has crippled many federal courts. As ABA president Bill Robinson recently explained, “[d]elay at the federal courts puts people’s lives on hold while they wait for their cases to be resolved. Businesses face uncertainty and costly holdups, preventing them from investing and creating jobs. In sum, judicial vacancies kill jobs.”

Of  course, this problem has an easy solution — confirm the people President Obama nominated to fill these vacant seats. Presently, nineteen nominees have cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee. Twelve of these judges cleared the committee without a single objection, and five more were voted out of the committee with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) as the only objector. Lee, of course, recently promised to oppose every single one of Obama’s nominees, and he also believes that national child labor laws, Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional — so his opinion of a nominee’s qualifications for the bench are not really entitled to any weight.

Yesterday, a wave of Democratic senators spoke out of the Senate floor about the growing vacancy crisis and the need to confirm these pending nominees, so it is clear that some action is coming on these nominees. When it comes — and it should not wait one second longer than it needs to — Senate Republicans will have a choice. They can either serve the American people by confirming a slate of judges that no reasonable person has lodged a single objection to, or they can prove that they care about nothing more than obstructionism by blocking these votes.