Republicans in the U.S. Senate again blocked a vote on one of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees yesterday. Robert Wilkins has served on the U.S. District Court for Washington, DC since his unanimous confirmation in 2010. But a cloture motion on Wilkins’ nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit failed with just 53 votes out of the 60 needed to end debate. Iowa’s Senator Chuck Grassley is the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and has led recent filibusters on two other nominees to the D.C. Circuit, claiming the court’s workload does not justify additional judges. In a floor statement that I’ve posted after the jump, Grassley made the same assertion but added a new twist:
There is no crisis on the D.C. Circuit, because they don’t have enough work to do as it is. […]
Even though we have a very real and very serious crisis facing this country because of Obamacare, the other side is desperately trying to divert attention to anything but the Obamacare disaster.
I’ve also posted statements below from the National Women’s Law Center and the Alliance for Justice, which again called for Senate rules reform. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution says that presidential nominees need a super-majority to be confirmed by the Senate.
UPDATE: I did not realize that Judge Wilkins filed the lawsuit against the Maryland State Police “that helped popularize the term ‘driving while black'” during the 1990s.
I’ve added some clips at the end of this post on the growing momentum for changing Senate rules to end fillibusters of judicial nominees.
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