While Republicans continue their assault on voting rights and abortion rights, it’s significant that President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees for the federal trial and appeals courts with experience in these areas moved closer to confirmation.
Among the dozens of nominees who advanced through the Senate Judiciary Committee late last week were American Civil Liberties Union voting rights lawyer Dale Ho, nominated to the Southern District of New York, and Julie Rikelman, who argued the Dobbs case in favor of abortion rights, nominated to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the northeast. These nominees and other civil rights lawyers moved closer to confirmation in the full Senate, to the acclaim of Democrats and to the fear of Republicans.
While it’s always important to focus on the Supreme Court, which of course can overturn lower court rulings, it’s also important to remember that not every case reaches the Supreme Court, and it’s crucial to have competent judges handling cases at earlier stages of litigation, whether their rulings are appealed or not.
Progress on judges also raises the issue of blue slips, the practice of deferring to home-state senators on nominees. (Republicans previously did away with the practice for circuit court nominees.) As The New York Times editorial board recently observed, it’s a “fundamentally undemocratic practice that gives far too much power to individual senators.” If Democrats want to make even further progress in the courts, then, as The Times noted, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., “holds the power to make that happen.”
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