Democrats say Utah's senior GOP senator is trampling the so-called Thurmond Rule, named after the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., the former committee chairman. While Republicans on the committee disagree with Democrats on the exact understanding of the unwritten rule, essentially it has meant that once each party has selected its presidential nominees, the committee suspends action on confirming the current administration's judicial nominees.
The call to freeze further judicial confirmations this close to a presidential election has been most frequently heard from the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont. He says the Thurmond Rule dates to July 1980, when GOP presidential candidate Ronald Reagan asked Senate Republicans, who were then in the minority, to stop confirming Democratic President Carter's judicial nominees due to the coming election.
"Senate Republicans have adhered to this rule with a Democratic president, whether they were in the minority, as in 1980, or the majority, as in 1996 and 2000," Leahy said during confirmation hearings earlier this week. "Although vacancies were much higher in those years than today, Republicans insisted on maintaining judicial vacancies to be filled by the president elected in the coming fall election."
But Hatch maintains Leahy is inventing history for political purposes.
"There is no Thurmond Rule, that's just Leahy popping off," he said in an interview. "Strom Thurmond did not control the committee in that regard, but they'll try to make it sound like it. The fact is we have to try to keep moving judges as much as we can because it's the country that's concerned, not politics."
On Tuesday, the Senate overwhelmingly confirmed two new federal district judges, bringing the total confirmed since Bush took office to 200. Challenging claims that there is a critical shortage of judges requiring more confirmations, Leahy said the number of current vacancies on the federal bench is 26, the lowest since Reagan was in office, and "there are more federal judges serving today than at any time in our history."
One of the nominees that Hatch wants to get confirmed before this 108th Congress closes - probably following a post-election lame-duck session - is Brigham Young University's top lawyer, Thomas Griffith. Bush has nominated Griffith to a seat on the District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court, which has exclusive jurisdiction over appeals of federal agency actions.
A notice of Griffith's confirmation hearing with a date "to be announced" was published this week in congressional newsletters, although Hatch has not formally announced a hearing date.
Griffith's confirmation was originally set for July 21, but was postponed following revelations he let his Washington, D.C., law license lapse for three years while serving as the U.S. Senate's top legal counsel and that he subsequently practiced law in Utah without a state license. Democrats plan to highlight Griffith's failure to maintain his bar standing as examples of carelessness and disregard for the law that should disqualify him from one of the nation's most prominent courts.
csmith@sltrib.com
