#scotus confirmation

[honeylemony]

Watching the amy coney barrett confirmation made me sick to my stomach.

[jesterbells]

[flawedlovabletaylor]

2020 just keeps getting worse and worse...

[thedawgsblog]

SCOTUS CONFIRMATION HEARING DATE OCT.12

SCOTUS CONFIRMATION HEARING DATE OCT.12

SCOTUS CONFIRMATION HEARING DATE OCT.12

SCOTUS CONFIRMATION HEARING DATE OCT.12

Republicans are eyeing Oct. 12 as the target date for the start of confirmation hearings for Trump’s pick to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a source familiar with the process told Fox News.

President Trump announced Amy Coney Barrett, 48, on Saturday…

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[angrybell]

I have to say about the thing with Kavanagh, that even though I have issues with democrats, that the GOP is being really hypocritical with being upset at them for delaying Kavanagh's confirmation. During the Obama era they refused to do anything with many judges he put forth (not Supreme Court ones but still). They can't get mad at dems when the GOP has done the exact same thing.

Well, that’s the story that the Democrats have put out, but the data does not support that. In fact, if you go back Bork, which if we’re being honest represented an actual epoch change in how judges and justices were confirmed, then the data is actually not in your favor.

Understand, that when Bork went from being a name to a verb beloved by the Democrats, especially then-Senator Joe Biden, confirmation of judges was pretty much a bipartisan deal. Most of the time there were less opposition votes than fingers on a hand.

In all, 14 nominations lapsed before a vote could be taken. Three of those were a result of the fighting between Tyler and his party back in the 1840s. The last one to lapse was Merrick Garland. 12 others have been withdrawn for one reason or another.

Including Bork, from 1789 to 1987, there were 10 nominees to the US Supreme Court who were not confirmed by the senate when votes occurred. Since then, no nominee for the Supreme Court has been voted down. Justices Kagan and Sotomayer were both confirmed. Republicans voted for both of them (5 for Kagan and 8 for Sotomayer). You have to remember that, because Senator Kennedy’s health, members of the GOP had to cross the line for cloture to be invoked because it required 60 votes and the Democrats only had 59. All the GOP had to do was not do anything and Sotomayer’s nomination would have died. And yet, they did.

With Kavanaugh, the rules were changed prior to the nomination. In fact, the rules were changed by the Democrats. Cloture was invoked on a 51 - 49 vote with only 1 Democrat crossing the line to vote for cloture.

So, on the one hand, the GOP could have blocked the nominee, but did not, whereas the Democrats were actively trying to block the nominee by voting in lockstep against cloture. But the GOP is hypocrites in this one. Why? Oh Garland.

Now, the main thrust of your argument is that the GOP delayed or did not confirm Obama’s picks for the federal bench. Let’s look at the numbers. Here are the numbers of judges placed on the bench since Regan in order from most to lease 9 https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_judicial_nominations_by_president):

Clinton (372) - he also had GOP majorities for 6 of the 8 years he was in office.

Reagan (364)

Obama (333)

Bush the Younger (323)

Bush the Elder (188)

So Obama did pretty well, but only one better than Bush the Younger. Why is that? And why was Bush the Elder’s number so low? Let’s take the questions in reverse.

Bush the Elder came into office with 37 vacancies to fill. When he left office, there were 111. Why is that? Well, Senator Biden, who was the chair of the Judiciary Committee, refused to hold hearings for 58 nominees to the federal bench.

Because Biden delayed and refused to allow votes to occur, the Democrats were effectively able to stockpile vacancies in the Federal court system so that they could fill them as soon as they got into office. Which they did in 1992 with Bill Clinton. Now, did the GOP refuse to hold hearings on some of Clinton’s nominees? Yup, 105. At the same time, Clinton also holds the record for most judges appointed. His success rate was 75%.

Now, this number is even more interesting when you consider how the Democrats treated Bush nominees. First, the basics. There were 515 people nominated by Bush for federal judicial positions. 324 were confirmed. That’s a confirmation rate or 62%.

Not only were the Democrats unwilling to confirm Bush nominees at rates similar to those in the past, they also delayed considered the nominations. On average, Bush nominees to the federal bench had to 700 days for a vote. Judge Kavanaugh had to wait 1,036 to be exact before he was voted on. He was not even the longest. The record is held by Bush’s nominee Terrence Boyle. He was nominated on May 9, 2001 and was withdrawn on January 9, 2007. That’s 2,071 days without a vote on his nomination. ,Not only were the wait times incredibly long, by design of the Democrats, the Democrats filibustered 10 Bush Appellate Court nominees.

Not content to drag out the process beyond the limit of absurdity and to filibuster the nominees, but the Democrats went a step further. In July 2007, Senate Judiciary Chair, Senator Chuck Schumer, that he would hold no hearings for any Bush nominees to the Supreme Court if a seat became vacant. That meant for 19 months, Bush was on notice that the Democratic controlled senate would not even consider his nominees. Furthermore, for any judge to be considered, Schumer said, “They must prove by actions, not words, that they are in the mainstream rather than we have to prove that they are not.”

That last statement is particularly galling when you consider Kagan is a socialist and who, while the head of Harvard Law School defended the curriculum which does not require a student to take constitutional law in order to graduate. Rather, as her statement made clear in 2006,

“From the beginning of law school, students should learn to locate what they are learning about public and private law in the United States within the context of a larger universe — global networks of economic regulation and private ordering, public systems created through multilateral relations among states, and different and widely varying legal cultures and systems.

“Accordingly, the Law School will develop three foundation courses, each of which represents a door into the global sphere that students will use as context for U.S. law”

People moan about Justice Ginsburg’s affinity for the South African Constitution, but Kagan actively took steps to diminish its value to lawyers with her steps. But Schumer would tell you that Kagan is “mainstream” and Kavanaugh, or Alito, or Scalia, or Thomas, or Bork, were not because their judicial philosophy is based on the text of the constitution.

Getting back to the main point, we get to Obama in office. When Obama was in office, he would eventually nominated 410 people to the federal bench. 81% were confirmed. Now, before you say “of course, held control of the Senate by a large majority”. Well, yes he did in 2008 - 2010. There were 55 Democrats who had 2 independents caucusing with them. The numbers would swing slowly in favor of the Republicans, but Obama would enjoy a Democrat majority in the Senate for most of his administration. Yes, there were some filibusters (2 for circuit court positions). In response to the 2, the Democrats removed the filibuster from the rules of the Senate.

It was Obama’s actions that prevented him from stacking the courts to the extent that Clinton did. In the first 9 months of his administration, Bush forwarded 95 nominations to the Senate for judicial positions. How many nominations did Obama send to the Senate during the first 9 months? 23. He only managed to push 3 through to confirmation. Bush the Younger, with a hostile Senate managed to get 10 of his nominees confirmed out of the first 95. In all, Bush submitted 55% of his nominees for vacancies by the end of the first year. Obama, by comparison, only submitted 29% of his nominees for open judicial vacancies.

Not only did Obama submit fewer nominees early on, he waited longer to submit the names. Obama, on average, submitted a nomination 406 days from the date the vacancy came up. This would drive up the vacancy counts, which would then be used as evidence Republican perfidiousness. However, its was Obama’s inability to make a decision that drove the vacancy time. Comparatively, Bush would wait about 276 days.

Obama’s nominees also had to wait less time to obtain their judicial commissions. From the date of nomination to confirmation, the average wait was 277 days. For a Bush nominee, it was 300. Basically his people were confirmed a full month sooner than Bush would be.

Now, tell me, how is it the GOP’s fault that Obama couldn’t be bothered to do his job? I mean, that’s what you are saying with your question. You are saying that Republicans slow played and denied the Democrats to put so-called “mainstream” legal minds on the bench when in fact the Democrats wasted their time and let the moment past.

But totally, I get it, its the nefarious, hypocritical Republicans who were at fault.

Eventually, Obama would start to stack the courts. In one year, November 21, 2012 to November 21, 2013, he got 51 judges confirmed. Had he not been too busy golfing or hanging out with Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and actually done his job, then he might have set a new record for judicial confirmations in 8 years. So I guess I should be thankful he was lazy.

When you look at the numbers, you look at the nominations, and you look at the shenanigans, you see that really it was the Democrats who are the hypocrites today and in the past. Overall, the Republicans have treated Democratic nominees better than the Democrats have treated Republican nominated judges when the tables are reversed.

Its the Democrats who are being hypocritical here.

And when you get right down to it, when the GOP did not want to confirm someone, they were honest about it. They did not engage in scorched earth warfare and try and destroy someone.

The Democrats, conversely, have, are, and will do it again. They have lost any sort of sense of proportion or common decency. They accused a man of sexual assault with no evidence and tried him in the court of public opinion where everything he did was filtered through the lens of their allies to make it appear as though he was guilty, a coward, or both. They did this in such a way that any defense he offered was treated only as a confirmation of his guilt. They sought to destroy a man’s reputation, ruin his life, and they did so in a cowardly, dishonorable fashion.

And that, right there, sums up what the modern Democratic Party, and its progressive/socialist allies are: dishonorable cowards who are massively hypocrital about what they are doing and what they have done to the judicial confirmation process.