Republicans gambled that a few well-placed Islamophobic smears would imperil the nomination of a Muslim American lawyer to a federal judgeship. They were right.
At this point I'm more interested in getting judges approved in quantity than arguing about specific ones. Russ Feingold said in a recent ACS podcast that we have 90 judicial vacancies to fill that will default to Trump if he wins. He said that Biden in 2021 promised that he'd fill the judicial vacancies, and that Biden has 90 identified candidates, mostly in "red" states ready to go. He can't nominate them, however, because Democrats refuse to eliminate blue slips, which allow Senators to veto any nominee to their state they don't want. Blue slips/vetoes seem like racist Senate etiquette rule that graciously allowed southern Senators to keep the Jim Crow south clear of any judges that might support the rule of law. I don't understand why Democrats won't move assertively to protect our institutions of government while they still can.
With the new Manchin "rule" though, even if we get rid of blue slips and nominate judges, we need at least one Republican to vote for them, so it seems like they can completely disrupt appointments anyway.
At this point I'm more interested in getting judges approved in quantity than arguing about specific ones. Russ Feingold said in a recent ACS podcast that we have 90 judicial vacancies to fill that will default to Trump if he wins. He said that Biden in 2021 promised that he'd fill the judicial vacancies, and that Biden has 90 identified candidates, mostly in "red" states ready to go. He can't nominate them, however, because Democrats refuse to eliminate blue slips, which allow Senators to veto any nominee to their state they don't want. Blue slips/vetoes seem like racist Senate etiquette rule that graciously allowed southern Senators to keep the Jim Crow south clear of any judges that might support the rule of law. I don't understand why Democrats won't move assertively to protect our institutions of government while they still can.
With the new Manchin "rule" though, even if we get rid of blue slips and nominate judges, we need at least one Republican to vote for them, so it seems like they can completely disrupt appointments anyway.
This is why we can't have nice things...