In the wake of the presidential election, National Review Online's Ed Whelan made it clear that the country can expect more of the unprecedented right-wing opposition of the past four years to President Obama's judicial nominees. However, news outlets often neglect this obstructionism and ignore the role of the GOP and conservative media in creating "judicial emergencies" where courtrooms across the country suffer from vacancies on the bench, an omission highlighted by a prominent judicial nominations expert.

Fresh off of ascribing a lack of virtues to the majority of the nation who re-elected the president, conservative legal analyst Ed Whelan urged the Republican party on November 8 to redouble its efforts in blocking judicial picks by expanding the obstruction to any and all Supreme Court nominees. In the NRO blog, Whelan wrote:

I'm surprised to see, in [a November 8] Wall Street Journal article, that one conservative legal commentator has opined (according to the article's paraphrase and internal quote) that "[b]ecause Republicans lost the presidential election and a couple of Senate seats, ... Mr. Obama was entitled to 'a lot of deference' should he wish to replace Justice Ginsburg or another liberal with a like-minded nominee."

I think that this view is badly misguided.

[...]

[C]onservatives shouldn't set a lower bar for a nominee who is replacing a liberal justice than for one who is replacing a conservative. Instead, we should make the case that conservative judicial principles are the right judicial principles and that anyone who doesn't embrace those principles is unfit for the Court.

This sentiment serves as a reminder of just how intransigent the right-wing has become in objecting to judicial nominees who aren't conservative ideologues. Although the named WSJ article at least referenced the prospect that Republicans would filibuster anyone left of centrist U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Judge Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court, it ignored the rampant obstructionism that has ground the lower court confirmations process to a halt. The unprecedented nature of this bottleneck could become even more apparent this week, when multiple stalled nominations will be sent to the lame-duck Senate floor in hopes of receiving the due consideration of an up-or-down vote that was accorded President George W. Bush's nominees exactly ten years ago. As recounted by the Constitutional Accountability Center's Doug Kendall:

There is certainly precedent for a big crop of lame-duck confirmations--in a five-day period in November 2002, a Senate controlled by Democrats confirmed 20 Bush judicial nominees on a voice vote, including contentious picks for appellate court slots, such as Michael McConnell (confirmed to a seat on the 10th Circuit) and Dennis Shedd (confirmed to a seat on the 4th Circuit).

This precedent may be overlooked, as it has become unfortunately common for the news media to downplay the GOP's role in blocking the President's nominees. But as judicial nominations expert and University of Richmond Professor of Law Carl Tobias has repeatedly noted, ignoring obvious obstructionism and instead claiming the administration fails to prioritize nominations - "overstat[ing] Democratic responsibility, and understat[ing] Republican" - does not adequately explain the unacceptably high number of vacancies in the federal judiciary. From Tobias' November 11 editorial in the Baltimore Sun:

Some critics blamed Mr. Obama for recommending an insufficient number of nominees in 2009, but he subsequently quickened the pace. Before making nominations official, the White House has robustly pursued the advice and support of Republican and Democratic senators who represent jurisdictions where vacancies have arisen. Mr. Obama has in most cases tapped noncontroversial individuals who are intelligent, ethical, industrious and independent, possess balanced temperament, and enhance diversity vis-á-vis ethnicity, gender and ideology.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has quickly scheduled hearings and votes, sending nominees to the floor. There, many of them have languished. For instance, on Sept. 22, the Senate approved two nominees even though it could easily have voted on 19 others, most of whom the Judiciary Committee had approved with minimal opposition. The Senate recessed without acting on any of those excellent nominees because the GOP refused to vote on them.

Republicans should cooperate better. The GOP has automatically held over committee ballots for seven days without persuasive reasons. However, the major problem has been the chamber floor. Republicans have infrequently entered time accords for votes. The unanimous consent procedure, which the GOP employed in September, allows one senator to halt floor ballots. Most troubling has been the Republican refusal to vote on uncontroversial, talented nominees -- inaction that contravenes Senate traditions. When senators have eventually voted, they overwhelmingly approved many nominees.

Whelan's post is not only an excellent reminder that the Republican obstructionism highlighted by Tobias may continue unabated, but also that Republican Senators have refused to be cooperative on centrist choices. Indeed, the prospect of Republicans only filibustering those "to the left of Merrick Garland," as suggested by the WSJ article, is highly suspect in light of the treatment of similarly centrist nominees this past Congressional session. 

Future coverage of federal court nominees should thus look to the influential Whelan as to why these vacancies are not being confirmed. Whatever responsibility the administration may have in not offering nominees in a timely manner, the real reasons lie in Whelan's admitted goal of a Supreme Court with a "supermajority" of conservative Scalia clones.