On the 700 Club today, Pat Robertson got to talking with the American Center for Law and Justice’s Jay Sekulow about President Obama’s three nominees to the D.C. Circuit Court. Although Robertson was concerned that there might be a “feminist”among them, Sekulow said he had no problem with the nominees themselves and instead repeated the GOP’s flimsy argument that President Obama’s nominating people to judicial vacancies constitutes “court-packing.”
Sekulow went out of his way to sing the praises of one of the three nominees, Patricia Millett, whom he called “a very bright lawyer,” but said the nominees’ qualifications are “not the question. The question is are these judges needed?”
Sekulow – like many of his allies in the Senate GOP – might want to check his own record before claiming that President Obama’s filling the D.C. Circuit’s vacant 9th, 10th, and 11th seats amounts to “court packing.” Under President Bush, Sekulow advocated for nominees to the very same seats: He boasted about “working aggressively” to confirm Janice Rogers Brown to the court’s 10th seat in 2005, supported Thomas Griffith’s nomination to the court’s 11th seat the same year, and demanded a vote on Brett Kavanaugh to the 10th seat in 2006.
Despite Sekulow’s vague claim that “There’s a real question as to the workload of these courts that are at an all-time low in the last ten or fifteen years,” the George W. Bush nominee who now runs the official body that recommends adding and subtracting federal judgeships has said the D.C. Circuit’s workload has remained “relatively steady” over that time.
Sekulow may also remember that he lobbied in 2005 to change the Senate’s filibuster rules in response to Senate Democrats’ blocking of a handful of extreme Bush nominees, saying that judicial nominees are “entitled...under the Constitution” to an up-or-down Senate vote.
Although he’s happy to rail against President Obama’s temerity in nominating qualified, unobjectionable judges to judicial vacancies, Sekulow signaled to Robertson that he would expect a Republican president to do the same, but to fill the vacancies with out-of-the-mainstream judges.
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” he said of the Senate’s recent rules change. “And it means what’s going to happen here is when the Republicans are back in control -- which will happen one day, in the Senate, in the White House – look out on who’s going to be appointed. There should be no holds barred on these judicial appointments.”
