President Obama has followed through on his vow to stop the rightward shift of the federal courts under President Bush and to add more diversity to the bench, reports USA Today. He is setting records for the number of women and minorities nominated--nearly half of his 73 judicial candidates have been women, 25% African Americans, 10% Hispanics and 11% Asian Americans. Yet he faces a deeply polarized confirmation process in the Senate. With little notice during his first 18 months in office, his administration has been thwarted by unprecedented delays.
Obama's trial-court nominees have been stalled more than such nominees of past presidents. Experts attribute the slow pace of confirmations to an increasingly polarized Washington, rather than any targeting of minorities. Even liberal advocates who follow judicial politics say the holdups are more the result of partisanship than of issues related to race or gender. Even so, the toll falls heavily on women and minorities because of the non-traditional selection of Obama's nominees. In some respects, they have become bystanders in an ever more combative system of appointments to the nation's courts.
Posted by Rick
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 08:56
I certainly hope it is merely a coincidence that an unprecedented number of women and minorities are the most qualified candidates for federal court justices. I would be appalled to learn that the president felt that race or gender should be a factor in choosing someone to fill these positions. Certainly anyone will agree that gender or racial diversity should not supersede merit when choosing people who will hold the law in their hands. Since it is preposterous to suppose this is what the president of the United States is doing, I will take this as a positive sign that women and minorities are receiving better education and better job opportunities than they have in the past and that our nation is correcting some of the regrettable mistakes it has previously made, and not as an attempt by the left to take vengeance upon conservative white men who they feel are responsible for all of the racial and gender oppression throughout the history of the world.