(Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Mitch McConnell has scheduled Judiciary Committee votes on six federal judges today, and hopes to move another 29 nominees through the process shortly. The Republican Majority Leader is jamming through those judges at a furious pace, and the younger, the better.
But he’s running out of seats to fill while the GOP is still in control of both the Senate and the White House, so the 78-year-old Majority Leader has turned his eye to a list of Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointees he hopes to persuade to trot out to pasture in favor of fresh horses. In fact, they should canter out to the field immediately, tossing their gavels to the Federalist Society’s Brownie and Boy Scout Troops on the way out the door.
“My motto for the year is leave no vacancy behind. That hasn’t changed.” McConnell promised conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt last month. “The pandemic will not prevent us from achieving that goal.”
The New York Times first reported in March that McConnell had “initiated outreach in an effort to heighten awareness among judges nominated by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush that making the change now would be advantageous.” Which is a nice way of describing a nakedly partisan attempt to stack the federal judiciary with a generation of ideologues who’ll bless every GOP gerrymander and usher in the demise of Roe v. Wade.
Now Business Insider has gotten its hands on the list of more than 80 judges who should really take up golf. Or macrame. Or the soul-cleansing joys of life in an ashram.
The list includes Supreme Court shortlisters from GOP administrations of yesteryear, like James Harvie Wilkinson, a President Ronald Reagan-era appointee from the Richmond-based 4th Circuit US Court of Appeals; Frank Easterbrook, another Reagan pick on the Chicago-based 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals; and Ricardo Hinojosa, a federal judge in McAllen, Texas, who has been on the bench since 1983.
Several barrier-breaking judges are also now eligible to leave their full-time jobs, including Juan Torruella, an 86-year old Reagan pick who remains the only Hispanic to serve on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, and 81-year old Ilana Rovner, whom George H.W. Bush tapped to be the first woman to join the 7th Circuit.
“You can’t take anything for granted,” former Senate GOP aide Mike Davis told BI. “These Republican-appointed judges may be stuck in their jobs for the next eight years if they don’t announce they are going to retire or semi-retire in the next several weeks.”
Davis heads the Article III Project, which works to “oppose the Democrats’ radical court-packing, term-limit, and judicial impeachment schemes” by filling all the judicial vacancies McConnell kept open during Barack Obama’s presidency. Clearly Mr. Davis, who helpfully compiled the hitlist for McConnell, is immune to irony.
And judgment when talking to a reporter.
“I’d love to see them leave,” Davis said. “If they want to be an ambassador to some tropical country I think we can probably make that happen.”
He later clarified he was joking.
Haw haw.
Depending on the results of the vote in November, look for McConnell to swear in his last nominee on the morning of January 20, 2021, then seamlessly revert to decrying Democrats attempt to pack the court by attempting to fill vacancies at exactly 12:02 pm. That train is never late!
McConnell Has a Request for Veteran Federal Judges: Please Quit [NYT]
Fearing the White House and Senate are lost, GOP insiders want these 80 judges to retire now [BI]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.