2mo ago

Obama-appointed judge becomes second on federal bench to unretire on Trump after election win

lawandcrime.com Obama-appointed judge becomes second on federal bench to unretire on Trump after election win

A federal judge in North Carolina appointed by Barack Obama has rescinded his decision to take "senior status," making him the second Democratic appointee to pull a reverse retirement on Donald Trump.

Summary

Two Democratic-appointed federal judges have unretired after the 2024 election, preventing Trump from appointing replacements.

The judges’ decisions were influenced by the Senate’s “blue slip” policy, which requires support from home-state senators for presidential nominees.

Republican leaders, including Mitch McConnell, have criticized the judges’ actions as partisan, while Democrats are rushing to confirm as many judges as possible before Trump takes office.

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Probably realized with 42 vacancies and Biden only nominating 12 of them, that Schumer and Biden just aren't motivated enough to fill their seats even if they leave today.
- Ah the good old "Dems just need to want it more".
- Well their is the norms of not appointing judges on a year of an election. Oh yah trump totally respected that.
  
  That was never a norm...
  That was the party betting that enough SC seats up for grabs might get people to vote for Hillary, but they were wrong
  Obama could seat someone on the legal rationale that while the Senate has the option to approve SC picks, there's nothing that says they have to. So he was taking refusal of a confirmation as implicit confirmation and seating him.
  Instead of, you know, just accepting that a SC seat was stolen.
  
  There is zero chance the Supreme Court would have sided with this approach of bypassing the senate.
  
  It's not bypassing them.
  Senate is entitled to a vote, but literally nothing says a vote needs to be held, just that they can.
  They had a year, and didn't.
  There's no such thing as a SC pocket veto.
  Sometimes I forget that was almost a decade ago, but this was widely talked about back then. It's not something I just thought of.
  https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/constitution-check-could-obama-bypass-the-senate-on-garland-nomination
  He also could have done a recess appointment
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/21/how-obama-could-appoint-merrick-garland-to-the-supreme-court-and-why-itll-never-happen/
  If you believe nothing could have been done so it was pointless to try...
  Well. We saw how that's worked out, didn't we?
  
  looks at a novel argument that President Obama can directly appoint a Supreme Court Justice if the Senate doesn’t act on a nomination.
  Excerpt from an op-ed column in The Washington Post on April 10 by Washington, D.C., lawyer Gregory L. Diskant
  That about says it all. This is not how it actually works. You're spreading misinformation just to say "Dems bad".
  
  That norm was also made up by McConnell because he didn't want Obama to replace Scalia.

18 comments