Just in case you needed another illustration of dysfunction in Congress, here’s one. The Senate has delayed the confirmation of 20 federal judges, including a highly qualified nominee for the federal bench in Utah, because of partisan wrangling over another issue.
David Nuffer already has served the U.S. District Court for Utah as a magistrate judge, having been appointed in 1995. He’s a former president of the Utah Bar Association and he sailed through confirmation hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee without opposition in October. Yet the full Senate failed to vote on his confirmation this month, delaying the process until at least the end of January, when the Senate reconvenes.
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The judicial nominations have been snagged by a bitter partisan row over the appointment of Dennis Cordray to be director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans are holding the judicial confirmations hostage in their effort to deny the new bureau a director, even though many do not object to Cordray’s personal qualifications.
What they seek, rather, is to change the bureau itself. They want its chief executive to be a commission rather than a director and they want its funding to come directly from Congress rather than through the Federal Reserve.
This sort of legislative obstruction is a major source of frustration for most Americans, who cling to the apparently quaint idea that issues should be voted up or down independently on the merits. They are right.
Meanwhile, in Utah, the federal district court is short two full-time judges while its docket becomes ever more crowded. Justice delayed is justice denied, but it is impossible to hear cases in a timely fashion if there are too few judges on the bench. Utah’s senior judges, who are semi-retired, at least in theory, are doing their best to take up the slack, but the number of criminal and civil filings is up by about 25 percent in the past couple of years. Filling the two vacant positions for full-time judges on the bench is critical to the court’s efficiency.
President Obama shares some of the blame with the Republican obstructionists in the Senate. The White House has been slow to nominate judges to the federal bench. But that’s not the main impediment now. In addition to Nuffer, who has had a hearing before the Judiciary Committee, the president also nominated Salt Lake City attorney Robert Shelby on Dec. 1.
Hobbling the courts is no way to win a political contest over an unrelated issue.
Copyright 2012 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
