In November 2014, President Barack Obama nominated Travis Randall McDonough to a federal judgeship in the 6th Circuit's Eastern District of Tennessee.
McDonough, a former chief of staff for Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, has the support of Tennessee's Republican senators Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander. McDonough also has already faced the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., and one expert there described the meeting as "a love fest," in which Corker introduced the nominee and called him humble.
"Travis is one of those people who you just love to see something like that happen to," Corker said of the nomination.
Our senators also vouched for a nominee to a federal judgeship in the Middle District of Tennessee, Waverly D. Crenshaw.
Up in Pennsylvania, two senators have done the same for Luis Felipe Restrepo, nominated to a judgeship on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Bob Casey, a Democrat, and Pat Toomey, a Republican, have seemingly blessed that nomination, according to a New York Times editorial that this one is piggy-backing on.
But, as the Times notes, that does not mean that McDonough, Crenshaw, Restrepo and more than a dozen more nominees to federal judicial positions will actually get through the confirmation roadblock led by Senate Republicans. Altogether, 16, including McDonough, have been approved by the committee, all unanimously, but are still waiting for a full vote on the Senate floor.
Another 13 nominees still have not received a hearing by the Judiciary Committee, according to The New York Times.
Since Republicans took over in January, the Senate has confirmed only nine of Obama's nominees, the slowest pace in more than a half century, the Times writes. Meanwhile, the seat McDonough would fill - that of retired U.S. district Judge Curtis Collier - is among 30 vacant federal judgeships the court system deems "judicial emergencies," meaning they have a backlog of hundreds of cases.
The Times says Republicans say Obama has seen more of his judicial nominees confirmed than President George W. Bush had by this time in his tenure in 2007. But that is mainly because Senate Democrats in 2013 stopped Republicans from repeatedly using the filibuster to block qualified nominees. After that, the Democratic-led Senate confirmed 96 of Obama's picks. The more relevant fact is there are 67 judicial vacancies today, far more than the number of vacancies Bush faced in 2007.
It's all just politics. Republicans are blocking votes on highly qualified and noncontroversial nominees to vent their anger with the president, who infuriated them with his now-stalled immigration action, among other things.
"Judges are not the only casualties of this interbranch crossfire," the Times writes. Attorney General Loretta Lynch waited almost six months before finally getting a vote.
Senate Democrats should speak up and make these inexcusable delays a national issue. The Times also is urging President Obama to start selecting judges himself in states like Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin and Indiana, where senators refuse to give him any names at all.
"With each day that passes without a vote" on McDonough and the other nominees, "Republicans undermine the justice system, and the biggest victims are ordinary Americans who cannot count on fully functioning courts," the Times writes.
We couldn't have said it better.