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

I’m so proud of our Green New Deal issue, which we launched on Thursday. It looks at the climate crisis the way an engineer would, and sketches out a road map for how to limit temperature rise, as policy, technical strategy, and politics. It’s a monumental achievement for us, one that Green New Deal resolution co-author Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) said at our launch event will be “the blueprint … The American Prospect has given us all we need to know.”

Please check it out at prospect.org/greennewdeal.

CONTEST UPDATE

OK, we are battling the ACLU and Fair Fight in the Credo donations contest, for our share of $150,000. And folks, we need some help. We are sitting at 28 percent of the vote, behind the ACLU at 44 percent. The ACLU is a great organization. They get so much money that if you handed them a check for $150,000, they could and probably would forget to cash it without any affect on their organization. We would not! We could really use every dollar, and this is a way for you to support the Prospect without giving us any money of your own. If you haven’t already, please go to credodonations.com/american-prospect and vote today.

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)

A second Trump administration will cement a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, and put our collective future in the hands of someone who will be virtually unchecked by our institutions. The country has shifted rightward, and the reverberations will ensue for potentially the next few decades. In this climate, a robust independent media ecosystem will be more important than ever. We're committed to bringing you the latest news on how Trump's agenda will actually affect the American people, shining a light on the stories corporate media overlooks and keeping the public informed about how power really works in this country.

Quality journalism is expensive to produce, and we don't have corporate backers to rely on to fund what we do. Everything we do is thanks to our incredible community of readers, who chip in a few dollars at a time to make our work possible. Any amount you give today will help us continue reporting on what matters to our democracy.

You can help power this newsroom by making a one-time donation or by becoming a member today.