Ratings Shrink President’s List for Judgeships
Fair Courts E-lert
Bibliographic Info:
Author: Charlie Savage
Source: New York Times
Date: November 22, 2011
Charlie Savage reports in the New York Times that “The American Bar Association has secretly declared a significant number of President Obama’s potential judicial nominees ‘not qualified,’ slowing White House efforts to fill vacant judgeships.” While President Obama has not gone on to nominate any of the candidates deemed unqualified, the number of nominees so ranked is a historic high: the number of “not qualified” Obama candidates “already exceeds the total number opposed by the [ABA] during the eight-year administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush[, and] the rejection rate is more than three and a half times as high as it was under either of the previous two presidencies.” Nearly all of the candidates given poor ratings by the ABA were women or members of a minority group, but President Obama’s efforts to diversify the federal bench have, nonetheless, borne fruit: “Many of his other female and minority prospects received favorable bar group ratings and went on to be nominated and confirmed; the judges he has appointed have been more likely to be women or minorities than those of any previous president.”