Impeachment as a Derailer of the Judges Train

by

We are moving full bore toward an impeachment trial in January in the United States Senate. Everyone has focused on the impact of this on the five senators running for president, who will be stuck hearing the trial in Washington six days a week rather than hitting the campaign trail in the critical weeks before voting in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But there’s potentially another aspect to this that, in the long term, may prove just as important. Since Democrats took the House of Representatives, the Senate has predictably become a judicial-nomination factory. This week, the Senate confirmed eight lifetime appointments to the federal bench in just three days. Mitch McConnell has changed the rules to speed up judicial nominations, and it has worked out to a record degree. An incredible 170 of Trump’s judges have been confirmed since he took office.

The impeachment trial would last six hours a day, six days a week, leaving far less room for judicial confirmations. Messing with the presidential race gives McConnell incentive to elongate the trial, and senators just aren’t going to want to deal with a lot of other business outside of that. They’ll lobby and whine to McConnell to let them go home. It’s unclear whether the Senate can even take up business outside of the privileged impeachment trial, although I’m sure McConnell will find a way around that. Still, his hands will be tied to a certain degree. It would be highly unlikely that he could get eight confirmations done in three days during the impeachment trial.

These judges will serve as the enduring legacy of the Trump era for decades. Would you trade a long impeachment for a slowdown in the judicial-confirmation train, even if it affected Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s time on the campaign stump? I would.

LINKS TO MY STORIES

Here’s a longread about the House drug pricing bill, once the highest-priority issue for House Democrats, which because of Nancy Pelosi’s bungled bipartisan strategy turned into something that doesn’t help the people who need help the most. (Read the story)

ALSO AT THE PROSPECT

Alex Sammon on the super PAC frenzy in the 2020 race.

Ryan Cooper reviews two new books on economics.

Alex Kotch looks at the largest recipient of oil and gas money in the House: conservative Democrat Henry Cuellar.

GREEN NEW DEAL

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Please check it out at prospect.org/greennewdeal.

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APPEARANCES

I was on The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen talking about Mike Bloomberg and journalism. Listen here.

SHARING THE WEALTH

Warren breaks the silence on Pete Buttigieg’s secret bundlers and the money primary. (HuffPost)

McKinsey is a government contractor theft operation, and the structure of procurement enables it. (Matt Stoller’s BIG)

All bank mergers succeed, and new legislation would put a stop to that, even as deregulation has greased the wheels for more. (NY Times)

Comedian Rob Delaney on the NHS. (Guardian)

We all have our problems with Tucker Carlson but this is a hell of a segment about hedge fund giant (and big GOP donor) Paul Singer destroying a small town. (YouTube)

Bloomberg says, approximately, “If you don’t like my buying the election, then YOU become a billionaire and do it!” (NY Times)

Meanwhile users of the Bloomberg terminal are directed to his campaign website. (Financial Times)

Trump is concerned that canceling student debt is popular and he has no response. DeVos doesn’t want to come up with one. Amazing story. (Washington Post)

Sunrise Movement playing in progressive primaries. (HuffPost)

Economists told us during the recovery that unemployment couldn’t fall so much. It did anyway. (NY Times)

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