The White House is sounding a much needed alarm about the nation's judicial crisis and Senate obstructionism. From a post by Colleen Curtis at the White House blog:
[E]arlier this month, the Senate left for its August recess without considering 20 eminently qualified candidates, 16 of whom had passed through the bipartisan Senate Judiciary Committee completely unopposed, a development the Washington Post called “not only frustrating but also destructive” in an editorial published yesterday.
The victims of these delays, of course, are the American citizens who are being denied the fair and timely judicial proceedings they deserve because of the chronic shortage of federal judges on the bench. Stephen Zack, president of the American Bar Association, told Senate leaders in a recent letter that the abundance of vacant federal judgeships “create strains that will inevitably reduce the quality of our justice system and erode public confidence in the ability of the courts to vindicate constitutional rights or render fair and timely decisions.”
They have a huge infographic accompanying the post, which "explains the confirmation process and highlights the bottleneck." Here are the key parts of it: comparing the confirmation rate and delays in confirmations for nominees of the past five presidents.
And here's the consequences of those delays.
Just to break it out: 1 in 10 federal judgeships is vacant, which means the wait for resolution of federal civil cases can be well over three years. In criminal cases, this means a cost to the federal government of $1.4 billion in 2010 for detention of inmates waiting around for their trials. There are 37 judicial emergencies in effect around the nation, where there are just not enough judges to hear the cases pending before the courts and cases are pushed beyond the statutory time limit for being heard.