Posts Categorized: dc circuit

AFJ President Nan Aron often says that “the left sees the courts as a path to justice; the right sees the courts as a path to power.”

Now ultraconservative judges in two circuits have issued decisions giving the right just what it wants – more power over women’s lives and women’s bodies.

Yesterday, a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a federal district court and reinstated one of the worst provisions of the appalling anti-abortion law in Texas – the provision requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of a clinic where abortions are performed (which is medically unnecessary and designed to shut down clinics).

As a result, clinics across the state that perform abortion are already shutting down. Of the 36 clinics performing abortions in Texas, 13 will have to close their doors, forcing women to travel hundreds of miles, and adding to their personal pain and expense – if they can get to a clinic at all.

As The New York Times pointed out:

In blocking the requirement on Monday, Judge Lee Yeakel of United States District Court in Austin accepted the argument of the clinics, and many doctors and national medical associations, that requiring admitting privileges had no bearing on safety because in the rare event of an emergency, patients will be rushed to the nearest hospital and treated the same way regardless.

But just three days later, three judges, all appointed by George W. Bush, overturned Judge Yeakel’s decision.

Then, today, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that two owners of a private, for-profit business could deny their employees insurance coverage for birth control because they claim it offended their religious beliefs.   The decision was written by Janice Rogers Brown, whose deeply-disturbing extremist views are well-known. She once referred to the onset of the New Deal as the “triumph of our own socialist revolution.”

Both of these cases are likely to wind up at the Supreme Court.

These decisions are two more classic examples of the judicial overreach of the far right.  Decisions like these illustrate the real reason Republicans have engaged in unprecedented obstruction of President Obama’s judicial nominees – particularly his nominees for the D.C. Circuit.

● It is because of these kinds of assaults on justice that AFJ is leading the fight to fill every vacancy on the D.C. Circuit. [link to DC Circuit landing page]

● It’s because of these kinds of assaults on justice that AFJ produced its 15-minute documentary Roe at Risk.

● And it is because of these kinds of decisions that Nan Aron and AFJ Justice Programs Director Michelle Schwartz will be in Texas next week, working closely with local advocates for reproductive justice and filling judicial vacancies.

We’re working to clear the obstacles in the path to justice.

By Nan Aron, President, Alliance for Justice

On Tuesday, I testified at a House Judiciary Committee hearing that posed the nonsensical question, “Are More Judges Always the Answer?”

This is a committee whose Republican members include Darrell Issa, Steve King, and Louie Gohmert, so it will come as no shock to anyone that a topic that sounds like a segment on a Fox News show was not designed to dispassionately explore the nuances of judicial nominations and the workloads of federal judges.

So what was this hearing really about?

It turns out it was actually about President Obama’s nomination of three highly qualified individuals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the court right below the Supreme Court in importance. You might ask why the House of Representatives is conducting a hearing on a subject that is the constitutional purview of the Senate, but the future of the D.C. Circuit is so important that it’s getting the full right-wing, high-volume Sturm und Drang treatment, even in places it doesn’t belong.

Of course the real action is on the other side of the Hill where Republicans in the Senate are doing everything they can think of to prevent the president from filling the three seats out of 11 that are currently vacant on the court. The Republicans are threatening a triple filibuster of all the nominees–no matter how qualified they are–claiming absurdly that there just isn’t enough work for the full complement of 11 judges the law requires. They began carrying out their threat today.

Click here to read the full column in The Huffington Post 

A funny thing happened at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday: Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Carolyn McHugh appeared for her confirmation hearing, and no Republican Senator complained that the Tenth Circuit’s caseload is too small to confirm another judge.

Judge Carolyn McHugh

It’s been a different story for President Obama’s three D.C. Circuit nominees. At each of their respective hearings, the Republicans sounded the same refrain: the D.C. Circuit doesn’t have enough cases to appoint new judges, new judges are too expensive, and the President’s attempt to fill preexisting, vacant seats is mere “court packing” that should be opposed.

Read more

Federal Judgeships Act seeks relief for overburdened courts but Republicans keep record of obstruction intact, throwing up roadblocks to reform

At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Bankruptcy and the Courts on the Federal Judgeship Act of 2013 today, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) made clear that Senate Republicans intend not only to both have their cake and eat it, but to then throw the cake at Democrats who are working to give federal courts the resources necessary to administer justice in a fair and efficient way for all Americans.

The Federal Judgeships Act, introduced by Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), would create 91 new federal judgeships to address a burgeoning caseload that’s been growing since the last time Congress passed a comprehensive judges bill in 1990.  The bill is based on the specific requests of the nonpartisan Judicial Conference, which is headed by Chief Justice John Roberts. 

Alliance for Justice supports this bill because, as Senator Coons said today, “Overburdened judges, almost by definition, cannot provide the level of time, and care, and reflection they would like to for each case before them.”

In opposing the legislation, Senator Sessions remarked that the President has not named nominees for 50 of the 92 current vacancies on thefederal bench and suggested that the need for more judges would be solved if the White House simply filled existing seats.  But here’s what Sessions left out: Of the 50 current vacancies without nominees, 25 are in states with two Republican Senators and 16 are in states with one Republican Senator, while states with two Democratic Senators only have 8.  That means that a whopping 82% of current judicial vacancies without a nominee are in states with at least one Republican Senator.

This disparity is no coincidence.As AFJ has consistently noted, President Obama knows that nominees who lack support from both of their home state senators have no chance of moving through the Senate Judiciary Committee, and therefore any pre- or post-nomination objection or opposition from a home Senator renders a nomination futile.  The Republicans have relied on this sort of backdoor obstructionism—using home state opposition to well-qualified and eminently capable candidates—to block the President’s attempt to fill critical vacancies, and are now cynically turning around and using these vacancies to oppose timely and important legislation.

This painfully obvious attempt to have it both ways cannot go unnoticed, and Republican Senators should be held accountable for unduly limiting access to the federal justice system.