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Trump Negotiates with Harris and Feinstein on Judge Picks
Since when do Senators get to choose Donald Trump’s nominees for the positions of federal judges? Since now.
In an article on Powerline which references an editorial piece in the Wall Street Journal , Trump has withdrawn three names from his original list of 50 judicial nominees. Imagine the outrage of Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein: all of the judges are considered to be conservative. The irony is that these potential judges and their records would otherwise be admired by people from the Left and Right. Patrick Bumatay is an assistant U.S. Attorney who specializes in drug enforcement; he is also a 40-year old gay Filipino American. Daniel Collins has a private law practice, was an associate deputy attorney general and worked on issues like child exploitation. And Kenneth Lee, also in private practice, was an associate counsel to George W. Bush and has a pro bono practice for the poor and incarcerated.
These are the men that Harris and Feinstein have rejected.
But both Senators offered an alternative for selecting nominees for the three open positions:
The Democrats want to pick one name from the White House list, one from their own and a third consensus nominee.
Both articles suggest reasons that President Trump might have agreed to this request. None of the reasons make any sense to me. They appear to be based on a hope and a prayer that the Democrats will be more cooperative toward future judges.
Consulting Senators in the past was done as a courtesy—you know, when Senators were willing to be more cooperative.
This decision bodes a bad future for our judiciary. Do you see something I might be missing that makes this a good strategy?
Published in Politics
What I really love about all the comments, just like always, is that no matter what Trump does that you don’t like, it is somehow the fault of Mitch McConnell and nefarious NeverTrumpers. It would be funny if it weren’t so boring.
Not all of us think that, @drusus. I was going to give him the full blame, it it had been true.
Sometimes boring is good.
It is nice to have one issue of Judges where NeverTrumpers/Severe Trump Skeptics and EverTrumpers stand shoulder to shoulder.
Trump has done a good job with Judges.
Let’s go to the text:
From Article II, Section 2:
The President appoints SC judges with the advice and consent of the Senate. It’s a check on his power which is (rightly) not absolute.
It used to be worse. The reason that SC nominations used to be lopsided is because of the filibuster. Between 1969 and 2013, when the judicial filibustered for SC nominees was ended, there were 14 successful confirmation votes. Only one of them was close: Clarence Thomas. (There were only three rejections in that period.)
The reason is because any nominee who couldn’t get enough voted to beat a filibuster was pulled. Someone like Kavanaugh would have been pulled had it not been for Harry Reid.
The President is not king. He’s supposed to negotiate with the Senate over nominations. Senators, even Democratic ones, have a role to play in the process. When you do end-runs around Congress or try to jam things through, it usually leads to bad stuff.
Trump skeptics are the reason we have his judicial appointees list. The only reason his judicial nominees have been good is because he outsourced the job to the Federalist Society. That happened because nobody trusted Donald Trump not to appoint his sister to the Supreme Court.
And how do you know that’s the reason it happened, Fred? Gee, maybe someone suggested it because he knew little about the judges available and he agreed that it was a good idea. And clearly, it was.
Blue slips exist for a reason.
The idea is that the home state Senator of a nominee might know something or have details about a nominee that people in Washington might not necessarily know.
For those of you who value local knowledge, you can see the practicality of such a thing. A Senator from Utah might not know if the guy from Maine is a drunk who beats his wife and steal from the treasury of the Elks club, but the Senator from Maine might.
And I like the idea that individual Senators can hold things up. It’s one of those protective barriers, like the filibuster, that limits how much damage can be done by tyrants, inside or outside the Senate.
Moderator Note:
Unacceptable language.I know because I was paying attention at the time.
The Right puts enormous emphasis on judicial nominations. Many people here on Ricochet will twist themselves into knots defending a [redacted] just because he picks the right judges.
Trump released his lists of potential judicial nominees as a way of getting conservatives on board with his nomination.
It’s still your interpretation, Fred, not a fact. You can criticize Trump on this post, but if you’re going to use that kind of language, please leave.
I think it’s clear that Fred is on to something. Trump did talk about appointing his sister. He knows a lot less about most things than some people are willing to admit. He does deserve credit for agreeing to the acquiescence. But it clearly wasn’t his idea.
I think most people think he was kidding and just wanted to push buttons. Clearly, it worked!
Thank you for the follow-up. I get a bit flustered, at times. This happened this AM and I acted too quickly, thinking I was correcting when actually I was making it worse. Appreciate not being called an “idiot,” or ‘Moron,” or some other such name.
The one time I was deeply tempted to vote for Trump in 2016 was when he released his list of proposed Justices for the Supreme Court. Then Trump said that I had no choice but to vote for him, and my response was “The hell I don’t have any other choice!”
The left has no idea how important the Courts are to us.
I am glad that all of us are together on this.
I’ll bet every one of us has done that at one time or another by accident. Don’t worry! You’re not alone!
No elected official in the House or the Senate should have a one-man veto on anything.
To be clear, Bumatay is now nominated for a federal district court seat, the trial judge level, under the same circuit, the 9th, to which he had been nominated at the appellate level (the crew we always hear bad things about before the U.S. Supreme Court reverses their decision). His influence will be limited to the cases he hears in his district, and he is farther away from consideration for SCOTUS, which is what the Democrats fear.
Here is the new presidential announcement of judicial nominees.
From the horse’s mouth:
So, while the President has held the line on his promise, we still have the Republican Senate effectively colluding with Democrats by only conducting floor business (“debate” clock) 3 days a week, while letting the Democrats demand 30 hours of debate per nominee, for both judges and administration officers.
Who’s his sister? Bobby Kennedy?
I think it happened because Trump knew his shortcomings in who should be appointed.
I applaud his outsourcing. Heck, you could say appointing cabinet members is “outsourcing” his responsibilities.
As for Trump’s sister, would you prefer she or RBG to be on the bench?
She’s 81, and has a mixed record…..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryanne_Trump_Barry
Back on track with the OP, here is Chairman Lindsey Graham’s recent commitment to promptly consider President Trump’s nominees:
Here is Chairman Graham’s response to President Trump’s latest notice of nominees for the 9th Circuit:
Thanks so much for keeping us updated, @cliffordbrown!
Whereas RBG’s record is pretty solid . . .
This is a monumentally stupid thing to believe. His sister is turning 82 this April. There was never any chance that Trump was going to appoint an octogenarian to the court, and if you think he was then that says more about your intelligence than his. He was asked at one point if his sister, who was a federal judge, would be a good Supreme Court justice, and he said yes. What’s he supposed to say? “No, I hate my sister”? Of course he said nice things about his own sister.
Why does Max Get to insult not only another member but a contributor? If I insulted another member, by calling him stupid, the moderators would be on me in a NY minute.
I thought about that only for a moment, @georgetownsend, but Max didn’t call him stupid, but the belief stupid. Still, you can flag him if you wish. The mods might agree.