Biden struggles to confirm judges in the South and thwart Trump's impact

[In It to Win It]

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/politics/biden-judges-south/index.html

President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats have moved quickly to appoint scores of judges during the past two years, outpacing former President Donald Trump, but they have stalled in the South.

The dearth of nominees offered in southern states, notably where both US senators are Republican, threatens to undercut Biden’s large-scale effort to counteract Trump’s effect on the federal judiciary, particularly to bolster civil rights and ensure voter protections.

The Biden team’s well-documented diversification of the courts – nominees have been overwhelmingly women and people of color, such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and offered professional diversity, including public defenders and civil rights lawyers – has withered when it comes to district courts in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas, where more than a dozen such court vacancies exist.

“That is where the entrenchment of hyper-conservatism is real and difficult to uproot,” said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

The pattern of vacancies, particularly in the South, is not lost on the Biden selection team, led by political veterans with deep experience in judicial selection and confirmation. (Biden, himself, as a senator from Delaware, once led the Senate Judiciary Committee.)

“All of these seats are deeply important to us. We care about all of these vacancies,” Paige Herwig, senior counsel to the President, told CNN. “It’s not a secret that a large number of vacancies are in states with two Republican senators. But we are always here in good faith. We are here to work with home state senators.”

[W_HAMILTON]

1. Do away with the so-called "blue slip" tradition and get to confirming.

Even though maybe Sinema/Manchin would be a pain in our ass if we did that, so maybe that's why we haven't done it yet. But Republicans already did away with the "blue slip" rule for certain nominees, and, using Republican logic, that means we can do away with it as well for whoever we want since "they did it first" (see: their excuse for eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees even though Democrats never eliminated the filibuster for them).

[leftieNanner]

2. Mitch ditched the blue slip tradition

during TFG's tenure. Or he ignored it. They placed a lot of toxic judges in states where the Democratic Senators refused to support them.

[TheRealNorth]

3. Exactly

Why the hell are we still honoring these traditions, when Republicans don't?

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. The blue slip needs to go

[appalachiablue]

5. Kicking this problemo.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

6. Either we use the power or we lose it. It's that simple.