Roberts to Senate: Confirm Judges
The New York Times reports:
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called on President Obama and the Senate on Friday to solve what he called “the persistent problem of judicial vacancies.”
The plea, in the chief justice’s annual year-end report on the federal judiciary, was an echo of one from his predecessor, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who made front-page news on New Year’s Day in 1998 by criticizing the Senate for failing to move more quickly on President Bill Clinton’s judicial nominees.
Both chief justices were appointed by Republican presidents, and both said that their interest was not in particular appointees but in a judiciary functioning at something like full strength.
“We do not comment on the merits of individual nominees,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote on Friday. “That is as it should be. The judiciary must respect the constitutional prerogatives of the president and Congress in the same way that the judiciary expects respect for its constitutional role.”
But he identified what he called a systemic problem.
“Each political party has found it easy to turn on a dime from decrying to defending the blocking of judicial nominations, depending on their changing political fortunes,” he said.
The upshot, he said, was “acute difficulties for some judicial districts.”
The chief justice noted that the Senate recently filled a number of vacancies. Including 19 recently confirmed judges, the Senate has confirmed 62 of Mr. Obama’s nominees. There are 96 federal court vacancies, according to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.
“There remains,” the chief justice wrote, “an urgent need for the political branches to find a long-term solution to this recurring problem.”
The chief justice’s report, which was 12 pages long and included four pages of statistics, was largely focused on the judicial branch’s efforts to save money in difficult economic times. It did not explicitly press for an increase in judicial pay, a topic that has been a major theme in earlier reports.
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