Barack Obama judicial appointment controversies


U.S. President Barack Obama nominated over four hundred individuals for federal judgeships during his presidency. Of these nominations, Congress confirmed 329 judgeships, 173 during the 111th & 112th Congresses and 156 during the 113th and 114th Congresses.
The most potent filibustering of Obama's nominees occurred in the Republican controlled 114th Congress. Obama nominated 69 people for 104 different federal appellate judgeships during this Congress, and although some nominees were processed by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, many of them stalled on the floor of the Senate. With the death of Antonin Scalia in February 2016, in the thick of a presidential election year, the Republican majority in the Senate made it their stated policy to refuse to consider any nominee to the Supreme Court put forward by Obama, arguing that the next president should be the one to appoint Scalia's replacement. Scalia's death was only the second death of a serving justice in a span of sixty years.
Even while Democrats still controlled the Senate, Republicans filibustered many nominees, and Senator Chuck Grassley commented that more nominees could have been confirmed had Obama respected recess appointment precedent by not making recess appointments while the Senate was in session. Although Obama never used a recess appointment to appoint a nominee to the federal bench, he had appointed some executive agency officials in January 2012.
As a response to the continuing blocking of several of Obama's nominees, Senator Harry Reid on November 21, 2013, invoked the so-called nuclear option and changed the Senate rules, meaning that a simple majority vote would suffice for all nominees except for the Supreme Court. This significantly sped up the pace of confirmations during 2014, especially to the district courts.

Failed Supreme Court nomination

Following the February 2016 death of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Antonin Scalia, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill Scalia's seat on the Supreme Court. At the time of his nomination, Garland was the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Scalia's death led to an unusual situation in which a Democratic president had the opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court nominee while the Republicans controlled the United States Senate; before Scalia's death, such a situation last occurred when a Senate Republican majority confirmed Grover Cleveland's nomination of Rufus Wheeler Peckham in 1895. Conversely, in February 1988, during an election year, the Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed Anthony Kennedy, who was the Republican President Ronald Reagan's nominee for the Supreme Court, though Kennedy had been nominated in November 1987 and was Reagan's third nomination to the seat. Garland himself was not personally controversial. However, political commentators widely recognized Scalia as one of the more conservative members of the Court, and noted that a more liberal replacement could shift the Court's ideological balance for many years into the future. The confirmation of Garland would have given Democratic appointees a majority on the Supreme Court for the first time since the 1970 confirmation of Harry Blackmun. After the death of Scalia, Republican Senate leaders announced that they planned to hold no vote on any potential nomination during the president's last year in office. Senate Democrats responded that there was sufficient time to vote on a nominee before the election. Garland's nomination expired on January 3, 2017, with the end of the 114th Congress. The nomination remained before the Senate for 293 days, which is more than twice as long as any other Supreme Court nomination. On January 31, 2017, President Donald Trump announced his selection of Judge Neil Gorsuch for the position. Gorsuch was later confirmed on April 7, 2017 by a vote of 54–45 and sworn in on April 10, 2017.

List of failed, stalled or filibustered appellate nominees

Failed nominees

Failed nominees

A 2016 study found that the current rate of federal judicial vacancies had led prosecutors to dismiss more cases and had led defendants to be more likely to plead guilty and less likely to be incarcerated. The authors found that "the current rate of vacancies has resulted in 1,000 fewer prison inmates annually compared to a fully-staffed court system, a 1.5 percent decrease."

Nominations that were made at the end of Obama's term and later renominated

Successfully appointed renominees