Page 14 of 28 FirstFirst ... 4121314151624 ... LastLast
Results 131 to 140 of 279

Thread: United States Courts of Appeals

  1. #131
    Senior Member CnCP Legend FFM's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Posts
    1,363
    It doesn't matter. They have 2 more years to clear the backlog. No need to rush.

  2. #132
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    The issue is that the 32 are going to have to go through all the theatrics again.

  3. #133
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2015
    Location
    New Jersey, unfortunately
    Posts
    4,382
    Waiting until the next Congress might be a good idea for confirming these judges. Senator Snowflake already vowed to vote no on everyone. He'll be gone in January, and we'll have 52/53 seats - plus more Trump Republicans and less RINOs like the aforementioned Flake.
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  4. #134
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    Third Circuit to Flip?

    By Ed Whelan
    National Review

    With the news that Judge Thomas Vanaskie will take senior status this Friday, the Third Circuit is poised to be the first federal court of appeals to flip from a majority of Democratic appointees at the outset of the Trump administration to a majority of Republican appointees. (Four federal courts of appeals—the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth—began the Trump presidency with a majority of Republican appointees.)

    When President Trump was inaugurated, the Third Circuit had seven Democratic appointees, five Republican appointees, and two vacancies.

    As of today, the court has seven Democratic appointees, six Republican appointees, and one vacancy. (Stephanos Bibas filled one of the vacancies, and David Porter replaced a Republican appointee, D. Michael Fisher, who took senior status early in 2017.)

    The nomination of Paul Matey is pending in committee and should be acted on by the full Senate very soon. Once Matey is appointed, the court will be evenly divided. And a successful replacement of Vanaskie (appointed to the Third Circuit by President Obama in 2010) would give Republican appointees an 8-to-6 margin.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/bench...rcuit-to-flip/

  5. #135
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    Something very urgent must've occurred in Vanaskie's life. He announced on Tuesday that he is taking senior status. This is extremely unusual since most judges give notice months before.

  6. #136
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2015
    Location
    New Jersey, unfortunately
    Posts
    4,382
    The Senate invoked cloture on Kobes yesterday. Pence broke the tie. He'll be confirmed today. If no other judges are confirmed - the Judicial Committee can quickly advance the others next year, since hearings were already held.
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  7. #137
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2015
    Location
    New Jersey, unfortunately
    Posts
    4,382
    Pence casts tie-breaking vote for Trump appeals court judge

    Vice President Pence broke a tied Senate vote on Tuesday to confirm Jonathan Kobes as a judge on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

    The vote was stuck at 50-50 after Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) joined with all Democrats in opposing the nomination. Flake, who is retiring in January, is voting "no" on all judicial picks until he gets a vote on legislation protecting special counsel Robert Mueller from being fired without cause.

    Pence, who was presiding over the chamber, broke the tie by casting the 51st vote to confirm Kobes.

    Pence has previously broken ties to confirm Cabinet nominees and to get judicial picks around procedural hurdles, but it's the first time Republicans have needed him on a confirmation vote for a Trump judicial nominee, according to a breakdown of recent tie-breakers from the Office of the Secretary of the Senate.

    Kobes's nomination is considered controversial because he was rated as "not qualified" by the American Bar Association's (ABA) standing committee on the federal judiciary.

    "The Committee believes that Mr. Kobes has neither the requisite experience nor evidence of his ability to fulfill the scholarly writing required of a United States Circuit Court Judge," Paul Moxley, the chairman of the committee, wrote to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein (Calif.).

    Feinstein, in a recent tweet, seized on the ABA's decision, arguing it underscored Democrats' argument that Kobes isn't suited for the influential appeals court seat.

    "Circuit courts are where most Americans receive final justice. They deserve to have qualified, experienced judges presiding," Feinstein said in the tweet.

    But Republicans have put a premium on being able to confirm Trump's judicial picks and have set a record for the number of appeals judges confirmed during a president's first two years. Kobes is their 30th appeals pick confirmed for Trump.

    Grassley, ahead of the Judiciary Committee's vote on Kobes, argued that Republican nominees aren't able to get a "fair shake" from the ABA.

    "Unfortunately, the American Bar Association is again politicizing a nomination to the 8th Circuit. For the second time in less than one year, the ABA has rated an 8th Circuit nominee 'not qualified,'" Grassley said at the time.

    "I see no basis for concluding that the absence of written work product means Mr. Kobes is 'not qualified.' The most that the ABA could've said is that they didn't have enough information to come to a conclusion about his writing abilities," he added.

    https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&sour...44671358840421
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  8. #138
    Senior Member CnCP Legend FFM's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Posts
    1,363
    Patricia Wald, First Woman to Preside Over D.C. Appeals Court, Dies at 90

    Patricia M. Wald, who was the first woman to serve as chief judge of the federal appeals court in Washington and who later wrote seminal rulings while serving in The Hague on the international court for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, died on Saturday at her home in Washington. She was 90.

    Her daughter, Johanna Wald, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

    Judge Wald was a pioneer for women in law, rising from a working-class family to enter the legal profession at a time when women were a rare presence. She eventually became the first woman to serve on — and preside over — the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, widely regarded as the second most influential court in the country. Her career spanned a generational change that propelled women into visible and prominent roles, including on the Supreme Court, a job for which she was once in consideration.

    Her path to becoming an important progressive voice in American jurisprudence showed the obstacles women faced in the mid-20th century. She graduated from Yale Law School in 1951; when she began, three years earlier, Harvard Law School did not even entertain applications from women. She became a law clerk for Jerome Frank, a prominent appeals court judge in New York, and worked briefly for some of Washington’s most prominent lawyers before leaving the workplace for 10 years to be at home with her family. She raised five children with her husband, Robert Wald, a Yale Law School classmate who established a thriving Washington law practice. He died in 2010.

    She described her choice without complaint or regret. “I didn’t feel any terrible sense of isolation or loss,” she said of leaving the workplace. “I just assumed I would go back.”

    In a 2006 interview, she described the question of whether motherhood is a real or fulfilling job as a false debate. “In my view, how you pursue your life as a parent and careerist is a question of individual personality,” she said.

    “I did not want to go back to work until my kids were in regular school,” she said, though she added that “I respect other women’s choices to go back earlier.”

    She first became pregnant in the early 1950s while working at Arnold & Porter, then a small firm formed by a few of Washington’s top lawyers. She hid her condition for a time because she feared that it would reinforce a negative view of hiring women. “I was afraid they might say, ‘You take your first woman associate and in three months, she’s pregnant,’” she said.

    For several weeks, she did her legal research across the street from the firm at a private library because, she said, she often collapsed in exhaustion over her books and just napped.

    After her decade at home, she went back to work, initially part time. She jointly wrote a book about bail in the United States and served on several commissions to improve legal services and juvenile justice. In the beginning of that period, her youngest child was not yet in school and she worked during his nap times and late at night. On weekends, she recalled, her husband took full responsibility for the children so she could work without interruption.

    She became a trial lawyer for the Legal Services Corporation and, after holding several other posts, was named assistant attorney general for legislative affairs by President Jimmy Carter, who later nominated her to the appeals court.

    Harold Hongju Koh, a professor and former dean of Yale Law School, described Judge Wald as an iconic figure in the sweep of American law. “It’s hard to think of a more exuberant pioneer in this arena,” he said. She excelled as a judge both in the United States and abroad, he said, and “fought for human rights and civil liberties everywhere long after many activists would have laid down their pens.”

    Patricia Ann McGowan was born on Sept. 16, 1928, in Torrington, Conn., the only child of Margaret O’Keefe and Joseph McGowan. In describing her childhood for oral history projects, she said she grew up in a crowded Irish-American household with an extended family of mostly women after her father left home when she was 2. While her mother and an aunt often worked as secretaries, the rest of the household revolved around episodic factory work at the Torrington Company.

    Her family, she said, took great pride in her academic success and made it clear they did not expect her to end up on the factory floor. She went away to Connecticut College — the school that offered the greatest financial aid — but spent her summers on the assembly line greasing ball bearings and fabricating sewing needles. The workers were on strike during her last summer there so she worked for the union.

    Everyone at home would chip in, she said, to see that she had decent clothes for school. “At one point, we had eight people in the house and only two were working, my grandfather and an aunt, and they were carrying the rest of us, as a family does,” she said.

    She recalled that some of her girlfriends from wealthier families were not encouraged to become professionals because their parents well understood the obstacles. But she benefited from her family’s lack of sophistication about the odds against her success. “They were like, ‘Go for it,’” she said.

    She joined the Court of Appeals in Washington in 1979. She was its first female member, but was soon joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would go on to become the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/12/o...wald-dead.html

  9. #139
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    Senate Republicans Press Ahead With Plan to Speed Up Confirmations

    By Steven T. Dennis
    Bloomberg

    Senate Republicans are pushing ahead with a plan to dramatically speed confirmation of most of President Donald Trump’s nominations, blaming Democratic obstruction for lengthy delays that sap floor time.

    Rules Chairman Roy Blunt and Republican James Lankford have proposed a measure that would limit debate on most nominees to just two hours of floor time, with Blunt planning to push the rules change through his committee Wednesday.

    Major nominations such as cabinet officials, circuit court judges and Supreme Court picks would still have up to 30 hours of debate before a final vote.

    Blunt said Tuesday the Democratic minority has abused their right to demand 30 hours of debate and it’s time to change the rules as a result.

    "With President Trump, it’s been 55 days from the time we get a nominee out of committee until the Democrats finally will allow that nominee to come to the floor," Blunt said. Blunt also said Democrats have forced 128 votes to cut off debate on nominees in the last Congress despite many of those nominees getting 70 votes or more.

    Blunt also complained that rarely did the hours of debate forced by Democrats result in actual floor debate on the nominees themselves.

    "It is clearly an attempt just to use up time to not let the president have the team he needs in place to run the government and not to let us have the legislative time we need," Blunt said.

    Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would oppose the rules change without concessions to Democrats.

    "Unless they go back to 60 votes or restore the blue slips, either one, then there’s a reason to move along," said Schumer of New York. "Not if they have monopoly power."

    Senate Republicans have angered Democrats by repeatedly violating a "blue slip" tradition of only moving forward with judicial nominations when home-state senators sign off on their selection.

    Democrats also complained when McConnell and Republicans eliminated the 60-vote threshold for ending filibusters on Supreme Court nominees -- years after Democrats did the same for other nominations.

    If Democrats don’t agree to the changes, many Republicans said they are prepared to change the rules by a majority vote. Republicans and Democrats have previously used a simple majority, known as the "nuclear option," to change the rules for confirming nominations.

    The move would free up time to fulfill Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s top priority: confirming as many conservative judges as possible.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-confirmations

  10. #140
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    Senate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks

    By Jordain Carney
    The Hill

    The Senate is set to escalate a long simmering fight over President Trump's judicial nominees.

    Republicans are poised to confirm a pick for the influential circuit courts next week without the support of either of the nominee's home-state senators--a first for the Trump era.

    Eric Miller is the first appeals judge to get a vote on the Senate floor this year, and the 31st of Trump's presidency. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) set up an initial vote on his Ninth Circuit nomination for Monday evening.

    "The judicial train is running in the committee and it will soon hit the floor," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told radio host Hugh Hewitt.

    Miller's nomination is set to revive a feud over "blue slips," a paper that indicates if a home-state senator supports a nomination.

    Though the Senate confirmed several appeals judges who were missing one blue slip last year, Miller would be the first circuit court nominee to be confirmed without getting a blue slip from either senator.

    Democrats argue Republicans are trying to defang the minority by moving nominees even if they don't have the support of a home-state senator.

    Spokespeople for Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a member of Democratic leadership, and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), confirmed to The Hill on Friday that they did not return a blue slip on Miller's nomination.

    Murray first announced late last year that she wouldn't return her blue slip for Miller, arguing that Republicans were trying to place "extreme conservatives" on the court.

    "This needs to end. So I am not going to be complicit in this latest rushed process to load the courts with Trump nominees in the lame duck session and I will not be returning the blue slip that signals my approval of this process," Murray said in a statement at the time.

    The blue-slip rule - a precedent upheld by Senate tradition - has historically allowed a home-state senator to stop a lower-court nominee by refusing to return the blue slip to the Judiciary Committee.

    How strictly the precedent is upheld is decided by the committee chairman, and enforcement has varied depending on who wields the gavel.

    But the use of the blue slip has emerged as a flash point during the Trump administration as several Democratic senators have refused to return their paperwork on circuit court nominees from their home states, setting up a round of fights between Democrats and the White House.

    Democrats went "nuclear" to nix the 60-vote filibuster for district and circuit judges in 2013, leaving the blue slip as one of the few options left for a home-state senator who is in the minority to try and hold up a nominee they oppose.

    "We are unilaterally disarming the Senate Judiciary Committee in a way that will have collateral damage well beyond the immediate goal of packing the courts with these nominees in a great rush," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the committee, said during an hours-long, contentious hearing earlier this month.

    Democrats and outside groups say Miller would be the first known example in the roughly 100 years that a blue slip has existed of a circuit nominee getting confirmed without either home state senator returning the slip of paper.

    "There are no known instances in which a nominee has ever been confirmed over the objections of both home-state senators. The Senate must not let Mr. Miller be the first, or it will strip senators of their constitutional role of providing advice and consent for appellate appointments in their states from this and all future administrations," Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, wrote in a letter to senators.

    Ryan Bounds, a nominee for a different Ninth Circuit seat, was poised to be the first last year when the Senate brought his nomination up for a vote without either Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) or Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) returning a blue slip. But his nomination was withdrawn after GOP Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) said he wouldn't support him.

    Republicans infuriated Democrats when they held a hearing for Miller during the October recess last year when most lawmakers were out of town. GOP aides argued that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the panel, had agreed to the dates, but
    Democrats say they did not agree to move forward if the Senate was not in session.

    Only two senators of the then-21 member panel attended the hearing, with Miller only getting asked two questions by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). Neither Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who was then chairman, or any of the Democratic senators were there.

    Republicans have dismissed complaints from Democrats over moving circuit court nominees despite the objections of home-state senators, arguing that Democrats are trying to apply a standard not enforced by most Judiciary Committee chairmen.

    "Now you're complaining about the fact that we won't allow two senators to take over the entire process? The blue slip process for circuit judges are not gonna be allowed to become a veto," Graham said on Friday.

    Republicans view the courts as their best shot for the party having a long-term impact.

    Appeals courts, in particular, are a top priority for McConnell because the circuit courts hear thousands of cases every year- compared to the Supreme Court which heard 69 cases during their last term -and often have the final say for states within their jurisdiction.

    Republicans set a record for the number of appeals judges confirmed during an administration's first two years and McConnell, speaking at a Heritage Foundation event shortly before the midterms, pledged that "if we hold the Senate I assure you we will complete the job of transforming the federal judiciary."

    Miller was one of more than forty nominees that were approved by the Judiciary Committee earlier this month and sent onto the full Senate for a vote. Of those nominations, six were circuit pick nominees.

    Graham indicated on Friday that Republicans have approximately eight to 10 circuit nominations to fill in 2019. He's also got looming fights over three Ninth Circuit nominees from California after Feinstein and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who is running for president, came out against the administration's picks.

    "We've got a real queue. ...Trust me on this, we will get our judges to the floor," Graham added. "Whatever you want to say about Mitch McConnell he's done a hell of a job when it comes to processing judges."

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...31i?li=BBnb7Kz

Page 14 of 28 FirstFirst ... 4121314151624 ... LastLast

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •