The Judicial Appointment Tracker provides current data on six components of the process: judicial vacancies, nominations, hearings, confirmations, votes to end debate, and roll call votes. Today, conflict over nominations to all three levels of the federal judiciary has become commonplace.įollowing and evaluating the judicial appointment process requires reliable, accurate, and current information. The growing conflict over the power and proper role of judges, however, has made the process for appointing them increasingly difficult. From 1789 to 2000, 97% of the judges approved by the Senate had no opposition at all. For two centuries, the process for appointing federal judges worked smoothly, with very little conflict. The Constitution gives the power to nominate judges to the president but requires the Senate’s consent for the president to appoint someone he has nominated.

The conflict over judicial appointments is really about whether the judiciary should operate as it was designed, with a defined and modest role for judges, or operate in a new way, with an almost unlimited and political role for judges. They want judges to be much more powerful, able to change what statutes or the Constitution mean so that their decisions serve particular political interests. Since about the 1930s, however, more and more people want to abandon this design for the judiciary. Judges must not rely instead on their personal views or purposes they may not twist the law or change what it means to make cases come out as the judge wants. They are supposed to do so impartially, which means determining what those who enacted statutes or ratified the Constitution intended them to mean. Instead, judges interpret the law and apply it to the facts of each individual case. Judges do not make the law like the legislative branch, or enforce the law like the executive branch. The system works best when each branch operates as it was designed. America’s founders designed a system of government with a defined role for each of the three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial.

Judicial consent cast