That is a June 2013 bill introduced by then Congressman Tom Cotton calling to reduce the DC circuit from 11 seats to 8. He had the nerve to call it the “Stop Court Packing” act.
Here are Republicans holding a hearing in which they lament Obama attempting to fill those three empty seats on the DC Circuit:
Republicans at a House Judiciary Committee hearing condemned President Obama’s nominations to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals as political court-packing that will cost U.S. taxpayers an unnecessary $1 million per judge per year.
“These three nominations, with the confirmation of another, is intended to pack the D.C. Circuit to capacity of 11 authorized judgeships,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., at the Monday hearing his party called “Are More Judges Always the Answer?”
Republicans vehemently condemned Obama’s nominees Robert Wilkins, Cornelia Pillard and Patricia Millet throughout the two-hour hearing, often directing their anger at Nan Aron, the president of Alliance for Justice, who testified
“It’s either [Obama’s] asleep at the wheel or he’s negligent,” Georgia Republican Doug Collins said, reacting to Aron’s statement that the D.C. Circuit is the “crown jewel” of the judiciary and the “farm team” to the U.S. Supreme Court, and needs to be filled .
Few Democrats spoke at the two-hour hearing – ranking Democrat John Conyers of Michigan stepped out just before the hearing began and never returned. Those who did speak criticized Republicans’ efforts to block all nominations coming from the White House.
“The entire budget of the federal judiciary makes up less than 1 percent of our entire federal budget,” said Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga. “It is not driving budget deficits and debt, and we know that this failure to adequately staff the judiciary is not about saving taxpayer dollars. It’s really about forming a judiciary that has certain ideological views, and it’s my friends on the other side of the aisle that seem to have that aspiration.
According to the www.uscourts.gov website, checked this morning, 74 of the 677 U.S. District Judge seats are vacant, with 41 nominees pending; and 17 of the 179 seats on the Federal Appellate Courts are empty, with nine nominees pending.
“Due in large part to the Republican obstructionism, nominees to the federal bench face record wait times from nominations to current confirmation in the Senate as compared to recent administrations,” Johnson said.
The president himself called Republican efforts to block his judicial nominations “unprecedented” during his June announcement of nominations for the D.C. Circuit, though he acknowledge that the Democrats had “not been completely blameless” of using the same tactics when he was a member of the Senate.Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, made the short trip across Capitol Hill to testify at the hearing and promote his bill, the Court Efficiency Act, which would remove one seat from the D.C. Circuit and reallocate seats to the Second and Eleventh Circuits.
Grassley claimed that the president plans to pack the court with judges sympathetic to his agenda to act as his rubber stamp and eat up tax dollars. Grassley and House Republicans also pointed to the president’s desire to fill the D.C. Circuit before other judicial emergencies as evidence of Obama’s desire to cement his political allies within the judiciary.
Let’s hear no more about how the Democrats are trying to destroy political norms by expanding the Supreme Court. After the Republicans’ unprecedented obstructionism during President Obama’s term, after which they turned around an packed the federal courts to gills with extremists and hacks — including stealing one Supreme Court seat under a made-up rationale and then completely discarding that rationale when it benefited them four years later — they have been left with no choice.
Republicans have become a rogue, undemocratic, power-mad political faction that no longer cares about legitimacy. They are dangerous to the survival of our constitutional order. Therefore, Democrats are obligated to use their own legal and constitutional power to re-balance the court and otherwise re-establish a constitutional order that recognizes majoritarian governance with protection of the minority instead of the GOP’s new formulation of minority rule with repression of the majority.
The Republicans have discovered that shamelessness is their superpower and they are unafraid to deploy it to force their ideology on the entire country. Democrats can no longer afford to stand by and let it happen out of an antediluvian adherence to “norms” that only they are observing.