There are all sorts of reasons Democrats are thrilled to take back control of the Senate, but near the top of the list is the power over the confirmation process: From executive branch roles to judicial nominations, a Senate majority makes all the difference.

This isn’t lost on Donald Trump. “Very important for the U.S. Senate to confirm all of our pending 161 Nominations, including 25 Federal Judges,” the president wrote to his social media platform earlier this week. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

The message did not go unnoticed on Capitol Hill. The Washington Sun reported:

President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans started a rush Tuesday to confirm as many judicial nominees as possible before they lose their majority in January, including the announcement of three new nominees.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance four judicial nominees to the Senate floor, teed up more committee votes on six other pending bench picks and held a confirmation hearing for another four.

The fact that this is happening is notable in its own right, though it’s also worth emphasizing how it’s happening: As HuffPost reported, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the outgoing chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “ditched a number of the panel’s standard practices” this week. From the report:

In the committee’s first hearing since the GOP’s drubbing in the midterm elections, Grassley signaled plans to hold nomination hearings this week and next week, violating the panel’s bipartisan practice of holding such hearings no closer than two weeks apart.

The Iowa Republican added two judicial nominees to next week’s hearing whose questionnaires were returned to the panel just 10 and 14 days beforehand, respectively, which violates the committee’s 28-day rule. Grassley is also calling up nominees for hearings even though their FBI background checks have not yet been cleared by staff, and plans to tee up as many as seven nominees for a single hearing.

There’s no great mystery here — Grassley is a partisan who wants to help the president continue to move the judiciary to the right — but I was struck by the outgoing chair’s defense of his efforts.

“Some Democrats so despise President Trump that for the first time in our nation’s history they’re planning to stonewall a president’s ability to appoint judges,” the Iowan told Reuters.

Look, I understand what Grassley is doing and why, but he must realize how foolish his defense is for his antics.

It is quite likely that the incoming Democratic Senate majority will balk at advancing Trump’s judicial nominees between January and the end of the president’s term. But the idea that this will be “the first time in our nation’s history” that a Senate majority took such a step is absurd: Senate Republicans stonewalled Barack Obama’s judicial nominees in 2015 and 2016, and they did the same thing to Joe Biden’s judicial nominees in 2023 and 2024.

Grassley is not a rookie. The 93-year-old incumbent has been in the chamber for more than 44 years, making him the second-longest-serving Republican in American history.

He was there when his party stonewalled Obama’s and Biden’s picks for the judiciary, and he never raised any concerns about propriety or norms.

The idea that Grassley somehow has no choice but to rush Trump’s nominees onto the federal bench because Democrats might be mean to the Republican White House in unprecedented ways is impossible to take seriously, as he really ought to know.

Regardless, while Trump’s ability to stack the courts is poised to effectively end, it’s cold comfort for those concerned about the radicalization of the judiciary. As a Politico report noted this week, “Trump has already, over the course of his two terms, appointed nearly 300 judges who, collectively, will pull the federal bench to the right for a generation. His second-term judges, in particular, have often proven to be outliers even among the conservative judiciary.”

The post GOP’s Grassley defends scramble to confirm Trump’s judicial nominees with unserious claim appeared first on MS NOW.

Author: Source Author

From MS Now.