by Renee Parsons, American Thinker:
Even before Mike Lindell failed to find any judge or court in the country to hear his legal complaint about fraud in the 2020 election, a pervasive cynicism existed that the nation’s Judicial Branch could no longer be counted on for fairness and objectivity before overstepping its authority with an arbitrary dismissal based on “standing” or avoidance of an edgy political matter — all of which raises the question of how some judges become judges in the first place.
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There is a general agreement that being a judge is a desirable, mostly cushy job. They pretty much make their own hours, set their own schedule and agenda, and establish judicial decisions with very little oversight or accountability. The question of how a judge survives a retention vote is a different standard; federal Article III judges never need fret about such archaic concerns.
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) described the committee with glowing words on the Senate floor: “The confirmation of highly qualified judges is one of the great, shared successes of President Biden and Senate Democrats.” There is more here than Durbin’s self-congratulating fable on behalf of an administration that has few bragging rights, especially when it comes to the quality of some of its recent judicial confirmations.
With twenty-two members, the committee’s jurisdiction provides critical oversight of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security and has responsibility for “advice and consent” on all Article III judicial appointments. Those judgeships include the Supreme Court and a total of 870 federal judges within the prestigious thirteen Appellate Courts, which are one step away from the Supreme Court — that means five state courts, with the “lower” ninety-four District Courts conducting trials related to federal law. All Article III judges are lifetime appointments, with a current annual salary of $223,000.
One week after Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, there were 59 Article III vacancies awaiting judicial appointment to federal courts. With full understanding of the need to dominate judicial nominations, the Biden administration began an unprecedented hustle to nominate 142 candidates to fill those federal appointments. By December 7, 2022, ninety-five federal judicial nominees had been approved by the Judiciary Committee and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, including twenty-eight circuit court judges and sixty-eight district court judges.
With its last confirmation in the 117th session of Congress, there are currently another eighty-three pending vacancies, including thirty-two nominees awaiting Senate approval, another six awaiting a committee vote, and ten awaiting a committee hearing. Those confirmations include eighteen federal circuit judges with fourteen non-white women and fifty-seven federal district court judges with forty-two non-white women. About 74 percent of the president’s confirmed nominees are women, and about 46 percent are non-white women, outpacing Trump’s confirmed judicial appointments of eighty-five at the same point in his administration.
With a steady stream of administrative approvals, required hearings and giving each nominee his due consideration such a massive, time-consuming task, one benefit for the administration’s high rate of nominees is the committee’s inability to conduct its legitimate oversight on the FBI, DOJ, and DHS. Each nominee requires three separate votes of the committee’s approval process: initial committee approval of the nomination followed by a cloture vote on the Senate floor and a final Senate floor vote on confirmation.
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