Our friends at the Committee for Justice sent around an email updating people on a particular case of judicial obstruction that relates to Michigan. AdvanceUSA shares the Committee for Justice’s hopes that judicial nominees will become an important issue in next Tuesday’s GOP Michigan primary. If you have friends and family in Michigan, please remind them of the importance of appointing qualified originalist judges to the federal courts rather than liberal activists who legislate from the bench. Send them a link to our 2008 Candidate Comparisons while you’re at it.
Below is an excerpt from the Committee for Justice:
With New Hampshire behind us, the next stop for the GOP presidential contenders is Michigan, home of four Great Lakes and the worst obstruction of judicial nominees in anyone’s memory. It’s been more than six years since Michigan Sens. Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow started blocking Michigan nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Despite a nearly 50% vacancy rate on the court at one point, they have persisted in their campaign of obstruction to this day. As a result, two exceptionally qualified Michigan nominees, Raymond Kethledge and Stephen Murphy, have gone more than a year and a half without so much as a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The seats to which they were nominated have long been declared judiciary emergencies.
…the essential point is that the confluence of the Michigan primary and the outrageous obstruction of the state’s nominees provides a great opportunity for journalists to ask the presidential contenders about the proper role of senators in the judicial confirmation process. After all, one of the most important constitutional responsibilities of a president is the appointment of federal judges….
At best, Sens. Levin and Stabenow are being petty. They have tried to justify their campaign of obstruction as payback for the failure of two second-term Clinton appointees to the Sixth Circuit – one of whom is married to Levin's cousin – to get hearings. At worst, Michigan’s senators are willing to subject the residents of the Sixth Circuit – spanning Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Michigan – to eight years of unnecessary delays in the justice system, in the hope that Levin and Stabenow cronies can be put on the court under a Democrat president.
Many suspect the latter motivation, given that Levin and Stabenow have been offered “generous” compromises that would put the two Clinton nominees on the federal bench, but the senators “can't take yes for an answer,” to quote a Detroit News editorial. No wonder the News said that the “intransigence by the Michigan senators goes beyond rough politics and verges on political malpractice.”
HT: Committee for Justice