GOP Attempting to Gerrymander Key DC Court
This is a purely political move designed to keep conservatives in the courts at disproportionate numbers to the populace. By redistributing the vacancies, Grassley is attempting to diminish the important court’s influence.
Grassley says the D.C. Circuit doesn’t have enough work to do, so he wants to cut one seat altogether and send two others to busier appeals courts in New York and Georgia. He’s supported by seven other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, a fan of the move, last week accused Obama of packing the court.
“I certainly hope that neither the White House nor my Democratic colleagues will instead to decide to play politics and seek without any legitimate justification to pack the D.C. Circuit with unneeded judges, simply in order to advance a partisan agenda,” Lee said.
But Russell Wheeler, who studies judicial vacancies at the Brookings Institution, says something else is going on — something political.
“Appointing judges to existing vacancies is not court packing,” Wheeler says. “It’s simply the way the system works.”
He adds: “It’s hard for me to believe that behind this so-called court efficiency proposal is not an effort to keep the court’s active judgeships balanced with four Republican appointees and four Democratic appointees.”
The D.C. Circuit appeals court could be busier, Wheeler says, but the measurements that Republicans are using don’t consider how complicated some of its environmental protection, energy and financial cases are. Wheeler adds that there’s no problem in theory with redistributing judges to where they’re most needed — but those proposals would be better coming from the Judicial Conference, a nonpartisan panel of judges, after studying court workloads, than from senators in the midst of an ideological debate.
More: Senators Tussle Over Proposal to ‘Unpack’ Key D.C. Court : It’s All Politics : NPR