Republicans Now Officially Opposed to Confirming Any Democratic Nominees for the DC Circuit Court

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Last week I mentioned that I had once dug into the subject of filling vacancies on the DC Circuit Court. I wanted to find out what the official objection to Obama’s nominees was:

The party-line answer, it turned out, was pretty straightforward: The DC Circuit doesn’t really have a very heavy caseload, so it doesn’t need any more judges. As you can imagine, this is a very handy argument indeed, since it means that Republicans don’t really need to cast around for a pretend reason to oppose Srinivasan or any of Obama’s other nominees. They can just oppose them all.

But that was a couple of years ago. Is it still the official party line? Yes! Ian Millhiser reports today that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–IA) has introduced a bill that would simply slash the number of seats on the DC Circuit and put a stop to any further Obama nominees completely. Here’s Grassley:

As most of my colleagues know, the D.C. Circuit is the least busy circuit in the country. In fact, it ranks last or almost last in nearly every category that measures workload….Given this imbalance in workload, today I am introducing the Court Efficiency Act. A number of my colleagues are co-sponsoring the legislation, including Senators Hatch, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, Lee, Cruz and Flake.

This legislation is straightforward. It would add a seat to the Second and the Eleventh Circuits. At the same time, it would reduce the number of authorized judgeships for the D.C. Circuit from 11 to 8.

So there you go! Just cut the size of the court from 11 to 8 and there’s no need to confirm any more pesky Democratic nominees. The court can continue handing off its overflow caseload to its retired senior judges, almost all of whom are safely Republican.

You can (and should) go read Millhiser for more detail about the reality of the DC court’s caseload and why Grassley and his little gang of cosponsors are full of shit. Or you can just accept the obvious: this has no basis in fact or policy. It’s simply another transparent Republican power play designed to maintain their stranglehold on the federal bureaucracy.

But I think it does answer a question. It’s possible that Republicans will agree to confirm Sri Srinivasan to the DC Circuit. He’d be the eighth judge, and he’s practically a gift to them anyway. But after that they haven’t the slightest intention of allowing any further vacancies to be filled. Not by Obama, anyway.

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate