Then why didn’t Onama fill those positions? That the main reason I voted for Trump, to fill the bench and SCOTUS with conservative judges. I thought the was the one thing he could get done. That effects the country long after a President leaves. Originally Posted by bambinoSo who is to blame?
Donald Trump inherited 88 district and 17 court of appeals vacancies. Fourteen months later he proclaimed “when I got in we had over 100 federal judges that weren’t appointed. I don’t know why Obama left that … Maybe he got complacent.”
The reasons for the vacancies—old news to most—was the flimsy confirmation record in the 2015-16 Senate (the 114th), with its new Republican majority. Just as it refused to consider Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, it shut down the lower court confirmation process. That’s water under the bridge. But documenting how the 114th Senate ratcheted up the contentiousness and polarization of an already broken confirmation process suggests how much harder it will be to ratchet it back into something with more comity and bipartisanship. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell now insists that there’s nothing “we can do …that’s more important … than confirming judges as rapidly as we get them.” Commentators boast that “Trump has had a massive impact on the federal bench.” The Republican majority refuses to grant Democratic senators privileges that Republicans and Democrats exploited vigorously in previous administrations.
Republicans took control of the Senate in 2014 during Obama’s last two years in office and did not confirm many of his nominees.
The Senate’s top Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitchel McConnell (Ky.), teamed up to block Democratic efforts to push forward Obama’s nominees, slowing down confirmations by the most in six decades.
Under McConnell’s leadership, Republicans leaned on every procedural rule in the book to stop Obama’s court picks. They refused to recommend judicial nominees to Obama’s White House. They slow-walked committee hearings. If a nominee cleared the committee, Republicans made the person wait three times longer for a Senate confirmation vote than did President George W. Bush’s nominees. Their efforts to deny judicial nominees the ability to even get a vote on the Senate floor ultimately led Democrats to change the rules in order to make it easier to advance nominees.
When Republicans won control of the Senate in the fall of 2014, it got even harder for Obama’s judicial nominees. By the fall of 2015, the GOP was confirming judges at the slowest rate in more than 60 years and had left the federal bench emptier than it had been in decades. By the end of Obama’s presidency, Republicans had driven up the number of judicial emergencies ― when a court is so overburdened it can barely function ― from 12 to 43 in the span of two years.
