Blue hairs and blue slips
By The Biden administration announced yesterday that it was nominating Irma Carrillo Ramirez to fill a vacancy on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The nominee is a Latina, which is good, but:
(1) Carrillo Ramirez is nearly 60. During his (first) presidency Trump nominated just one person to the federal judiciary as old as that.
(2) She’s getting nominated because John Cornyn and Ted Cruz are vouching for her. This in turn is because Dick Durbin is choosing to follow the latest iteration of the Senate’s ever-shifting blue slip policy. I suspect Texas’s two fascism-friendly senators are OK with her because she seems relatively innocuous to them, both because of her age, and because she’s been a low-level magistrate judge for 21 years now (Obama nominated her to the same position in 2016, but she got Garlanded by Mitch McConnell’s Senate majority), and doesn’t come across as an “activist” — this means unapologetically liberal — judge.
Which brings us to the absurdity of blue slips in this increasingly disturbing day and age. There are currently 77 federal court vacancies. Well more than half of these vacancies haven’t even produced a nominee from the Biden administration yet. Indeed, almost half of those vacancies — 20 in all — have been without a nominee for more than a full year now. For example, there’s a Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals seat that’s been vacant for more than two years, and yet still doesn’t even have a nominee for this crucial position! (The circuit currently features a six to five Democratic to Republican split among the judges).
Two factors are at play here. One is that, after an initial burst of energy, the Biden administration’s internal nomination process seems to slacked off and been overtaken by a level of bureaucratic inertia that we can’t afford at the moment. The other is of course the blue slip nonsense. Note that the blue slip “rule” isn’t even a rule: it’s purely a Senate custom, which is completely in the control of whoever is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the moment. In addition, there isn’t even anything like a consistent historical custom here, as the custom has shifted drastically over the course of the century in which it has been in place.
For example for many decades a failure to return a blue slip did not stop a nominee from getting a vote from the full Senate. The current custom of blocking a nomination altogether originated with arch-segregationist James Eastland’s decision to stop those outside agitators from getting put on the federal bench. Now there’s a precedent Dick Durbin can be proud of, apparently.
In any event, the Biden administration’s backsliding toward Obama-era levels of relative indifference towards this subject is maddening, especially under present circumstances. This is one mistake that the right wing never makes: it has been laser-focused on putting as many 40-year-old ideologues on the federal bench as possible for decades now, and of course that focus is paying off big time in real time.
You would think this situation would concentrate the minds of our Democratic gerontocracy, but I guess not.