Donald Trump's Buds Keep Missing Senate Votes, So More Biden Judges Get Confirmed
Hey, CNN, maybe don't publicize that.
Shortly after the election, Donald Trump demanded that Democrats in the US Senate not confirm any of Joe Biden’s judicial nominees to the federal courts because ,after all, Trump was now president and Republicans had won control of the chamber. He just didn’t think it was fair that Biden and Democrats will actually remain in office until January. The demand appeared as part of the same fake Trump Twitter message in which the newly-elected tyrant ordered Senate Republicans to please not bother holding confirmation hearings for his Cabinet appointees, because his picks would all be so awesome that there’d be no need for anything but recess appointments to get them to work.
Neither demand has worked out quite so well for Trump.
In addition to all his astonishingly bad Cabinet appointments, Trump has had little luck getting GOP senators to stay in Washington to block or at least slow down Biden’s judicial nominees, as CNN reports. Monday night, Democrats confirmed Embry Kidd for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, on a 49-45 vote in which Joe Manchin (Manchin Party - West Virginia) voted with Republicans because he’s still doing that thing where he’ll only vote for a nominee if the person has at least one Republican vote. Five Republicans missed the vote, including JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Hill Haggerty (R-Tennessee), who were both hanging out with Trump at his Florida trash palace on important transition work, probably looking at old VHS tapes of Fox and Friends to find people to fill lower Cabinet agency jobs. Hagerty is up for something, too.
After Kidd was confirmed, some rightwing activists went on Twitter to complain that JD Vance should be setting a better example for his Senate R colleagues, leading the stinky mass of human butt hair to tweet back that one of them, Grace Chong, CFO of Steve Bannon’s interminable podcast, was a “mouth-breathing imbecile” because didn’t she know he had important vice-president-elect work to do, stupid? While he was at it, he let slip that Trump is considering replacing FBI Director Chris Wray, just one more norms breach because FBI heads aren’t supposed to be political. Eventually, Vance deleted the tweet.
In following days, more Biden judges were confirmed thanks to Republicans being AWOL from the Senate. Tuesday, two were confirmed with several Rs missing the vote, including Vance again, and with Hagerty and Ted Cruz joining Trump in Texas to watch Elon Musk’s latest rocket launch. The nominations might have been blocked if all the Goopers had shown up, because Kamala Harris was travelling and wasn’t available to break a tie.
It happened again Wednesday, with two more judges being confirmed easily since Republicans weren’t able to gum up procedural votes.
The string of successful confirmations prompted Trump to post a fake Twitter message Tuesday in which he griped that
The Democrats are trying to stack the Courts with Radical Left Judges on their way out the door. Republican Senators need to Show Up and Hold the Line — No more Judges confirmed before Inauguration Day!
Salon helpfully points out that in fact Trump posted the complaint hours after he was joined by several GOP senators that he’d invited to watch the SpaceX launch in Texas, which occurred at the same time as the Senate vote. Damn their lack of discipline.
Even if Republicans take the hint and improve their attendance in the Senate between now and the end of the session, Democrats should still be able to work their way through many if not all of the 30 remaining Biden judicial nominees awaiting confirmation. That would cut deeply into the 42 current federal judicial vacancies, depriving Trump of the chance he had in 2017 to fill the judiciary with loons. Thanks to Republican obstruction in Barack Obama’s final year, roughly 100 judicial seats were open when Trump took office.
That’s so mean and unfair, and it sure would make Trump mad if Democrats manage to surpass the 23 lame-duck confirmations that the GOP Senate did after the 2020 election. Even if Democrats can’t match that, it’s pretty certain that none of Biden’s nominees will be as awful as one of those last-minute Trump jurists, Judge Aileen Cannon.
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Was watching some of yesterday afternoon's votes. A coworker and I commented on how fast it was going. For those who aren't used to seeing the Senate calendar, a judge usually takes two days, sometimes three, due to procedural hurdles with such a closely divided chamber (again, this is with no filibuster on those judges, it can STILL be slowed). We're doing multiple in one day right now. It's right quick.
Aah, so sad. Gaetz is removing himself from consideration for AG. "My confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition" .. in other words, I am such a skeevy crimey pedo that even Republicans might not vote for me.