Doug Berman asks a good question: "If concerned about border enforcement, why are Arizona's Republican Senators so slow on judicial nominations?" Customarily, home-state senators submit to the president names of acceptable district-court nominees. According to Politico, Sens. John Kyl and John McCain do not appear to have submitted names to Obama for the three pending vacancies on the Arizona federal trial court. (One of those vacancies is to replace John Roll, the judge who was killed in the shooting at Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' constituent event in January.) Meanwhile, federal judges in Tucson are managing caseloads of 1,200 pending criminal prosecutions each. That's, in part, because the Obama administration has stepped up border enforcement in Arizona, generating a flood of immigration-related criminal cases. For anyone with a federal case pending in the Arizona federal courts, civil or criminal, those numbers mean longer waits for court dates and slower progress on their case. For pretrial detainees, those numbers mean more time in jail before their case gets resolved. Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski , a Reagan appointee, describes the situation as "very disconcerting," and says he's "pleaded with senators to hurry up the process." Of course, McCain and Kyl have found plenty of time to flog their "10-point comprehensive border security legislation to combat illegal immigration, drug and alien smuggling, and violent activity along the border." Funny how they seem less concerned with putting enough federal judges in place to handle actual cases of "illegal immigration, drug and alien smuggling, and violent activity along the border."
