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Thread: Federal District Courts

  1. #31
    Senior Member CnCP Addict johncocacola's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Aaron View Post
    51 votes isn't enough? Do they need 60?
    Yes. You need 60 votes to change the text of the rules. The nuclear option doesn't change the text of the rules just sets a precedent that Trumps the rules.

    McConnell will now raise a point of order that he's changing the rules and the presiding officer of the senate will rule against him because it goes against the rules and McConnell will then appeal the ruling of the chair which can be overturned by a simple majority.

    Reminder, Harry Reid did an identical rules change in 2013 that passed with 78 votes but it only lasted for the 113th congress. Schumer said he will not agree to any rules change without concessions to democrats.

  2. #32
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Senate Republicans invoke nuclear option to limit nomination debate time

    By Danielle Haynes
    United Press International

    Senate Republicans voted to invoke the so-called nuclear option Wednesday to change rules to reduce debate time on the confirmation process for certain Trump nominees.

    The chamber used a simple majority to change the debate time for lower-level judicial and executive nominees from 30 hours to two hours. It normally takes a supermajority, or 60 votes, for a procedural change on such nominees.

    All Democrats and two Republicans -- Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Mike Lee of Utah -- voted against the change.

    The vote was intended to speed the confirmation process for a backlog of lower-level nominees, but leaves the debate time unchanged for Cabinet-level, federal appeals judges and certain other nominations.

    Under the new rules, the Senate confirmed Jeffrey Kessler as assistant secretary of commerce. The chamber also was expected to confirm Roy Kalman Altman as a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

    Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky threatened to use the nuclear option Tuesday after he was unable to secure a supermajority vote to change the rules.

    He accused Democrats of obstructing the confirmation process, even for nominees they eventually end up voting to confirm. He said the delays are a relitigation of the 2016 presidential election.

    "It's been 354 days and counting in Senate purgatory for the president's nominee to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Two-hundred eighty-seven days and counting for the under secretary of state for management. Noncontroversial lower court nominees have languished for weeks and weeks -- for no discernible reason -- before they, too, were confirmed unanimously," McConnell wrote in an op-ed posted on his website. "These are just a few examples of the historic obstruction Senate Democrats have visited upon President [Donald] Trump's nominees for two years and counting."

    Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York called the use of the nuclear option Wednesday "a sad day for the Senate."

    "McConnell brags about confirming more judges than anyone in a long time," Schumer said on Twitter. "but he wants to invoke the terribly destructive nuclear option to fast-track even more of President Trump's ultra-conservative nominees."

    Wednesday's vote was the third time in six years the Senate has used the nuclear option to leap the 60-vote hurdle needed for the confirmation process. In 2013, Senate Democrats -- then the majority -- voted to limit filibusters so they cannot be used against presidential nominations. At the time, McConnell told Democrats they "may regret" the use of nuclear option "a lot sooner than you think."

    And in 2017, Senate Republicans invoked the nuclear option to prevent Democrats from filibustering the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

    Changes to the arcane Senate filibuster have been threatened by both parties during contentious nomination fights in the past. The minority party has long leaned on the filibuster as a means of maintaining a foothold in the confirmation process.

    https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2019...2971554322125/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  3. #33
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    With the confirmation of Rodolfo Ruiz today Trump has had 100 Federal Judges confirmed so far. 128 federal judicial vacancies remain. Counting district, circuit, SCOTUS.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  4. #34
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Manuel Real, Long-Serving and Frequently Reversed District Judge, Dies at 95

    By Amanda Bronstad and Ross Todd
    The Recorder

    The longest-serving federal district judge in modern history, Manuel Real, has died at age 95.

    Real, a U.S. district judge for the Central District of California for 50 years, died on Wednesday, court officials reported Friday. Appointed in 1966 by President Lyndon Johnson, Real was known for his colorful antics in court and was frequently reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

    “I am sad beyond words at the death of our beloved friend, colleague, mentor and leader,” said Central District of California Chief Judge Virginia Phillips. “Judge Real has been the heart and soul of our district since it was formed in 1966, and his passing leaves an unfillable void for us, his family, the legal world and the larger community. His legacy of public service is an inspiration beyond compare.”

    Real was a 1951 graduate of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He had served in the U.S. Navy Reserve during World War II from 1943 to 1945. After law school, he was a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of California, later serving as U.S. attorney for that district from 1964 to 1966.

    When he was nominated to be a federal judge, the Central District of California had just been created.

    In 1970, Real ordered the desegregation of the Pasadena Unified School District.

    Real was a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States from 1981 to 1984, and served as chief judge of the Central District of California from 1982 to 1993.

    Real, however, developed a reputation for being frequently overturned at the Ninth Circuit.

    The string of reversals really took hold after Real notoriously feuded with police misconduct litigator Stephen Yagman, whom he fined $250,000 for courtroom behavior during a contentious 1984 defamation trial.

    Yagman appealed, and the Ninth Circuit reversed Real and ordered another judge to consider the sanction issue. “The fragile appearance of justice has taken a beating,” Ninth Circuit Judge J. Blaine Anderson wrote in In re Yagman. “It is time to conclude the matter as quickly and as painlessly as possible.”

    Real though declined to let go of Yagman’s case, holding onto it while the outcome of another appeal involving a similar issue was pending. In the other case, the Ninth Circuit again ordered Real removed after he twice refused to follow the court’s instruction to dismiss it.

    After the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Real’s personal petition for certiorari, he finally let go of both cases. “I felt very strongly about those cases,” Real told The Recorder in a 1999 judicial profile. “They can sit back and look for something I did wrong and make their calls. That’s their job,” he said of the circuit court. “But I’m in the courtroom and I call them like I see them.”

    In 2003, Yagman filed a complaint against Real for allegedly taking over a bankruptcy case involving a woman whose loan fraud case the judge was overseeing. Former Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Mary Schroeder initially dismissed the complaint against Real, but later appointed a committee to investigate. By that time, Congress had begun considering whether to initiate impeachment proceedings against Real, who denied wrongdoing.

    Real said Yagman had a “personal vendetta” against him. The Judicial Council of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ultimately issued a public reprimand of Real.

    Among Real’s orders reversed by the Ninth Circuit were three decisions in a long-running antitrust class action against the publishers of the Barbri bar review course that led to his removal in a related case in 2016.

    Real took senior status on Nov. 4.

    https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019...ge-dies-at-95/

    Jack B. Weinstein, Aged 97, turning 98 in two months, of the District Court for the Eastern District of New York, is the last LBJ judge sitting on the bench.
    Last edited by Mike; 06-28-2019 at 07:24 PM.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  5. #35
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    July 3, 2019

    To Battle Shortage of Judges, Wolfson May Enlist Out-of-State Help

    By Charles Toutant
    Law.com

    The shortage of judges that plagues New Jersey’s federal courts became even worse on the first day of Freda Wolfson’s tenure as chief judge.

    The retirement of the previous chief judge, Jose Linares, in mid-May brought the number of vacancies to six on the state’s federal bench, out of 17 authorized judgeships. The number of judicial vacancies in New Jersey has grown because President Donald Trump has yet to make any District Court nominations for New Jersey during his two years in the White House.

    “We’re in a whole new place, a different place than we were in the past, with six vacancies. It’s more than a third of our court,” Wolfson said.

    Even worse, federal judiciary officials in Washington have determined that the proper number of district court judges for New Jersey is 20, but only 17 judgeships are funded, she said.

    While she can’t do anything to fill the vacancies on the federal bench, some measures are being undertaken to mitigate the shortage, Wolfson said. And the District Court judges, magistrates and retired judges serving on recall continue to adeptly manage their heavy caseloads, even bringing case files along in the summer when they head to the beach or the mountains, she said.

    “Obviously, we’re all trying to do the best we can to continue to move our cases and handle them in the best way possible. That’s our focus—getting the work of the court done. At the same time, we’re a place where we continue to do programs to involve the bar, work with the federal bar—brown-bag lunches, professionalism day,” Wolfson said.

    Federal court filings in the state continue to grow rapidly, particularly in the areas of multidistrict litigation and patent disputes, Wolfson said. And criminal filings have seen an uptick since Craig Carpenito became U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey in 2018, she said. As a result, the caseload per judge continues to grow rapidly, she notes.

    Even before Linares’ retirement, the District of New Jersey was deemed by the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts to be in a state of judicial emergency, with weighted filings of 903 cases per judgeship in 2018, the second highest in the nation, trailing only the Eastern District of Louisiana.

    The state’s shorthanded judicial district will get some relief from the creation of two additional magistrate judgeships, one in Trenton and another in Newark, she said.

    That initiative has been in the works for more than a year. The first new magistrate, Zahid Quraishi, formerly chairman of the white-collar defense practice and chief diversity officer at Riker Danzig, started his new post in early June. And on July 12, Edward Kiel, a litigator at Cole Schotz, will be sworn in, Wolfson said. She noted that magistrates handle nondispositive motions, discovery matters, settlement conferences and bail hearings in criminal cases.

    “Also, lawyers can consent to magistrate jurisdiction for trial—maybe we’ll see more of that,” she said.

    Besides increasing the number of magistrates, the District of New Jersey may receive reinforcements from other district courts in the Third Circuit where judges aren’t in such short supply, Wolfson said. She has spoken to her counterpart in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania about getting help from judges in that district, and the details are being hammered out, she said.

    Wolfson won’t rule out turning away future multidistrict litigation cases, a category that accounts for a large chunk of the New Jersey caseload. The Judicial Panel for Multidistrict Litigation, which decides where drug litigation and other mass tort cases will be heard, frequently sends such cases to New Jersey.

    The state’s District Court is currently host to thousands of mass tort cases, including suits claiming talcum powder from Johnson & Johnson contains cancer-causing asbestos particles, as well as other mass tort litigation concerning the drugs Benicar, Invocana, Plavix, Valsartan and proton pump inhibitor drugs.

    “The MDL panel will call and ask if the district and the judge are agreeable to taking the case. In the future, we may consider whether it’s appropriate to take on a new case if we’re overload, but right now we have what we have.

    That may be something that we’re going to consider in the future,” Wolfson said.

    Wolfson graduated from Douglass College and Rutgers Law School, and worked for the now-defunct Clapp & Eisenberg and the firm now known as Lowenstein Sandler. She served as a U.S. magistrate judge from 1986 to 2002. That year, President George W. Bush nominated her to a seat on U.S. District Court.

    Wolfson’s best-known rulings include a 2013 decision upholding New Jersey’s law banning so-called gay conversion therapy for minors. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed Wolfson’s decision the following year.

    https://www.law.com/njlawjournal/201...of-state-help/

    In the past eight days senior judges William H. Walls and Jerome B. Simandle of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey have died.

    8/10 of the senior judges in New Jersey are over the age of 70. The two others are 69. It's highly likely that more of them will die before a single spot is filled,
    Last edited by Mike; 07-19-2019 at 10:31 PM.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  6. #36
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Mitch McConnell has filed for cloture on 19 district judges today to make up for the August Break.

    https://twitter.com/SenateCloakroom
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  7. #37
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Trump names new nominee to oldest federal judicial vacancy

    By Todd Ruger
    Roll Call

    President Donald Trump named a new nominee Wednesday for a spot on the federal bench in North Carolina that has remained vacant for more than 13 years and has been one of the most contentious in Senate judicial confirmation fights.

    Richard E. Myers II, a Jamaica native and a professor at the University of North Carolina law school who focuses on criminal law, will be the next pick for the Eastern District of North Carolina, the White House announced. The seat is the only vacancy in that district, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

    The spot has been open through the past three administrations because of the Tar Heel State’s contentious politics and the way senators have used traditions to block nominees. And advocacy groups have highlighted the racial overtones of the confirmation fight over the seat for the Eastern District, which they say is nearly 30 percent black but has never had a black federal judge.

    The previous nominee, Thomas Farr, was teed up for a confirmation vote on the floor in November but yanked amid concerns about his past work on voting rights. The Raleigh-based lawyer, who is white, defended in court North Carolina’s voting laws that judges later struck down as discriminatory for targeting minorities “with almost surgical precision.”

    Farr’s nomination was all but sunk last year when Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s sole black Republican, announced his opposition to Farr. The nomination was returned to the White House in January because the Senate never voted on it.
    Eight months later, Trump has picked Myers instead of renominating Farr. Myers previously prosecuted a wide variety of crimes as an assistant U.S. attorney in North Carolina and California. He has been on the UNC faculty since 2004.

    President Barack Obama’s nominees for the seat, both of whom would have been the first black federal judge in the district, were blocked by home-state Republicans.

    Senate Democrats twice blocked President George W. Bush’s nominee for the same vacancy on the bench — the same Thomas Farr that was set to get a floor vote a dozen years later. It became vacant when a judge took senior status on Dec. 31, 2005.

    Trump also announced Wednesday that he would nominate a White House adviser to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which is headquartered in New York.

    Steven Menashi, currently a special assistant to Trump and senior associate counsel to the president, was previously a law professor at George Mason University.

    https://www.rollcall.com/news/oldest...ts-new-nominee
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  8. #38
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Albert Bickers Bryan Jr former chief judge of the Eastern District of Virginia died on the 27th. He is best known for running the most efficient and fastest federal court that there ever was and ever will be.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  9. #39
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    I've got a federal jurisdiction question as it relates to investigations and possible indictments of Andrew McCabe, Jim Comey, Hillary Clinton, Peter Strzok, James Clapper and others connected with their conduct in the Russia hoax, the e-mail controversy and other matters. The conventional wisdom seems to be that if federal trials were held in the District of Columbia, it'd be awfully hard to win a conviction due to a jury pool in the District that's 90% Democratic.

    So, could a prosecution also, be brought for, say, McCabe in the Eastern District of Virginia since he lives in Northern Virginia? Could jurisdiction also lie where one has a summer home, or a time share? Could it be where one still has business holdings--as the Clintons may still have in Arkansas?

    In other words, how can these people be federally prosecuted anywhere that isn't DC?

  10. #40
    Senior Member CnCP Addict johncocacola's Avatar
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    I believe it would have more to do with the federal court jurisdiction where it took place. Clinton for instance would probably be Southern District of New York since her home where the personal email account was is in Chappaqua, Westchester County. Charging them in Arkansas would be hard since they haven't lived there since 1999.

    Comey on the other hand probably could be Eastern District of Virginia depending on what the charge would be, like leaking his notes to the New York Times.

    For Clapper and Strzok, I don't see any other place where their cases could be filed other than the District of Columbia.

    In any case, the prosecution could always argue for a change of venue like what was done with Timothy McVeigh.

    But change of venue could be a tough sell since judge shopping is something both sides take advantage of.

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