Spending a full year as a pending judicial nominee is nothing to celebrate.  Senators should heed the pleas of Judge Kozinski and his colleagues, move quickly to report Goodwin Liu’s nomination out of Committee, and then move promptly to confirm him and fill this judicial emergency seat.

For decades, conservatives like Ed Whelan, the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a prolific blogger at National Review’s Bench Memos, have criticized progressive judicial nominees for not endorsing originalism or for espousing a “living Constitution.”  So you would think that Whelan would be overjoyed that many of President Obama’s nominees, including D.C. Circuit nominee Caitlin Halligan – scheduled for a cloture vote next Tuesday -- have emphasized the priority they put on the Constitution’s text and history.

While the Senator is correct that Democrats did invoke the filibuster against a handful of Bush nominees after losing control of the Senate in 2003, he conveniently fails to mention that his party provoked a constitutional crisis over this, threatening to explode the Senate by detonating a procedural stratagem that members of Senator Cornyn’s party dubbed the “nuclear option,” which would have ended filibusters of judicial nominees.

Perhaps the Justices now wish they had listened to Ms. Halligan.

While the Senator is correct that Democrats did invoke the filibuster against a handful of Bush nominees after losing control of the Senate in 2003, he conveniently fails to mention that his party provoked a constitutional crisis over this, threatening to explode the Senate by detonating a procedural stratagem that members of Senator Cornyn’s party dubbed the “nuclear option,” which would have ended filibusters of judicial nominees.

On the final day of 2010, the vacancy crisis that is plaguing the federal judiciary was thrown into the spotlight by a previously silent and very important voice: that of Chief Justice John Roberts.

We recently noticed that as part of a response to a judicial nominations piece by Dahlia Lithwick and Carl Tobias, Ed Whelan took a quick swing at numbers CAC has been using about a stunning increase in Senate floor confirmation vote wait times for judicial nominees, which show that President Obama's nominees are facing unprecedented obstruction tactics in

While the Supreme Court is fully-staffed, the same can hardly be said of our country’s lower federal courts – the trial courts (known as District Courts), and the courts of appeals (the Circuit Courts) – where more than 100 judicial seats -- nearly one in eight -- are now vacant.  It is the judges on these courts who bear the greatest burden when it comes to dispensing justice to the American people.

In a recent, important speech before the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy decried the growing crisis in our nation’s federal courts caused by an increasingly insufficient number of judges available to dispense justice to the American people.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee sent on April 22, CAC has urged the Senate to confirm Berkeley Law Professor Goodwin Liu to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  As we stated in our letter, Professor Liu’s “exceptional record of accomplishments, his ‘well qualified’ rating by the American Bar Association, and his testimony at his confirmation hearing on April 16” demonstrate that Professor Liu “is overwhelmingly qualified to sit on the Court of Appeals.”