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New Congress, New Round In Senate Fight Over Obama’s Judges

New Congress, New Round In Senate Fight Over Obama’s Judges

By David Hawkings, CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

WASHINGTON — In the long-running judicial wars between the Senate and the White House, the first skirmish of the year is flaring into the open this week.

How it plays out will offer insight about whether the new Republican majority plans to continue making the federal bench a venue for venting displeasure with President Barack Obama, or whether he’ll be allowed to refashion the courts a bit more during his final two years in office.

The locus of the new fight is L. Felipe Restrepo, chosen by the president six months ago for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He’s the only person Obama has picked for eight current vacancies on the regional appeals courts. The seat has been open for 18 months, and as a result, the caseload recently became so backlogged that the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts declared a “judicial emergency” for appeals out of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.

But the Senate Judiciary Committee is convening its third hearing of the year Wednesday afternoon to hear from judicial nominees, and Restrepo is not invited. His supporters say efforts to spur his progress behind the scenes have been frustrated at every turn.

“This is just slow-walking a totally qualified nominee,” said Kyle C. Barry of the Alliance for Justice, which advocates for a more liberal judiciary. “There’s no substantive reason, and it’s unconscionable.”

Progressive advocacy groups and some Senate Democrats suspect Restrepo is being held hostage by the GOP as the latest act of retribution for Obama’s executive action on immigration last fall, which sought to grant an indefinite reprieve from deportation to millions of people in the country illegally.

The initial Republican approach — withholding funding from the Department of Homeland Security unless the president reversed course — ended up as a high-profile collapse this winter, and the Senate GOP’s fallback effort to deny Loretta Lynch’s confirmation as attorney general after she said she would support Obama’s policy has come to naught this spring. Now, some on the right are suggesting the best possible Plan C is preventing new judges on the appeals courts.

“There is little risk of the public outrage that might accompany a DHS shutdown or even a fight over a Cabinet nominee,” Curt Levey of the conservative Committee for Justice legal think tank wrote in the Wall Street Journal in March.

“Nonetheless, denying Mr. Obama the power to shape these all-important circuit courts would give Republicans nearly as much leverage as a broader approach,” he continued. “If Republican senators stick together, this is a no-lose strategy. Either the president relents by rescinding or substantially modifying his immigration orders, or Republicans halt his leftward transformation of the circuit courts and keep judicial vacancies open for a possible GOP president in 2017.”

The staff for Judiciary Chairman Charles E. Grassley said the Iowa Republican is not embracing this approach. Instead, they say the committee is still reviewing the latest background check — something of a curiosity, given that only two years ago the FBI conducted a thorough review of the 56-year-old Restrepo’s life before he was confirmed (on a voice vote) for his current job as a federal trial court judge in Philadelphia.

“You can see by the numbers that there is no strategy,” spokeswoman Beth Levine said, offering statistics suggesting the GOP timetable on judges at this point in Obama’s presidency is comparable to the Democrats’ pace during President George W. Bush’s seventh year in office.

Adding to the mystery behind the Restrepo delay is the fact that one of the judge’s most important public supporters, Republican Patrick J. Toomey, has not returned the endorsement form (known as a “blue slip”) that the committee requires from each home-state senator before a judicial confirmation process begins. He and Pennsylvania’s other senator, Democrat Bob Casey, jointly recommended Restrepo for the lower court, and last fall Toomey declared “he will also make a superb addition to the Third Circuit.”

Toomey’s office declined to discuss the missing blue slip, but spokeswoman E.R. Anderson said Toomey still supports confirmation “and hopes it gets done this year.”

The senator is at a politically difficult moment in his career. A favorite of free-market and social conservatives, he will stand for a second term in a presidential year in a state that’s voted Democratic for president in six straight elections. So far, at least, Toomey has done little to shift his agenda or his voting record toward the middle ahead of 2016.

Professing his support in public for a prominent home-state figure — while withholding his formal endorsement behind the scenes for a time as a gesture of solidarity with fellow conservatives — would count as only the slightest feint to the middle.

A native of Colombia who came to the United States as a toddler and became a citizen in 1993, Restrepo would be the second Latino ever on the Third Circuit. But he would be the first judge on that court who’s been a public defender, having done that work in state and federal court for six years after law school.

He then spent 13 years in private practice, focused on civil rights and criminal defense, before becoming a federal magistrate in 2006, where he ran a program that assisted federal convicts newly released from prison to finish high school, clear up bad credit and find employment.

Restrepo might still end up as a symbol of the immigrant success story and a reminder that the poor oftentimes benefit from good court-appointed lawyers. Or he could become the latest high-profile victim of partisan brinkmanship in the shaping of the judicial branch. This early in the year, it’s still too early to predict.

Photo: Jeffrey Beall via Flickr

Obama’s Midterm Loss Record Could Make History

Obama’s Midterm Loss Record Could Make History

By Stuart Rothenberg, CQ Roll Call

President Barack Obama is about to do what no president has done in the past 50 years: have two horrible, terrible, awful midterm elections in a row.

In fact, Obama is likely to have the worst midterm numbers of any two-term president going back to Democrat Harry S. Truman.

Truman lost a total of 83 House seats during his two midterms (55 seats in 1946 and 28 seats in 1950), while Republican Dwight Eisenhower lost a combined 66 House seats in the 1954 and 1958 midterms.

Obama had one midterm where his party lost 63 House seats, and Democrats are expected to lose another 5 to possibly 12 House seats (or more), taking the sitting president’s total midterm House losses to the 68 seat to 75 seat range.

Most recent presidents have one disastrous midterm and another midterm that was not terrible.

The GOP lost 30 House seats in George W. Bush’s second midterm, but gained 8 seats in his first midterm for a net loss of 22 seats. The party lost 26 seats in Ronald Reagan’s first midterm, but a mere 5 seats in his second midterm for a net loss of 31 seats.

Democrats got shellacked in 1994, losing 54 seats in Bill Clinton’s first midterm, but the party gained 5 House seats in 1998 for a net Clinton loss of 49 House seats. (The figures don’t include special elections during a president’s term.)

Looking at Senate losses, Republicans lost a net of 5 seats in George W. Bush’s two midterms, while Republicans lost a net of 7 seats during Ronald Reagan’s two midterms and Democrats lost a net of 8 seats during Bill Clinton’s two midterms. (Again, these numbers do not reflect party switches or special elections.)

Democrats have a chance to tie the number of Senate losses that Republicans suffered during the midterms of Eisenhower, when the GOP lost a net of 13 Senate seats (12 in 1958 and only one in 1954).

Democrats lost 6 Senate seats in 2010 and seem likely to lose from 5 to as many as 10 seats next week. That would add up to Obama midterm Senate losses of from 11 seats to as many as 16 seats.

Democrats will likely not exceed the number of Senate losses they incurred during the two Truman midterms, in 1946 and 1950, when the party lost a remarkable net of 17 seats.

Are the Democrats’ losses due to the increasingly partisan nature of our elections and the makeup of the past two Senate classes, or is the president at least partially to blame because he failed to show leadership on key issues and never successfully moved to the political center?

The answer, most obviously, is, “Yes.”

AFP Photo/Saul Loeb

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Partisans Segregate Themselves In Separate News Universes, Study Finds

Partisans Segregate Themselves In Separate News Universes, Study Finds

By David Lauter, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Die-hard liberals and down-the-line conservatives have segregated themselves into strikingly different news universes, relying on sources of information that often reinforce their views and discussing politics mostly with others of like minds, according to an in-depth new study.
Although few people manage to live in a complete ideological bubble, the most politically active and aware Americans – the ones who dominate election contests, particularly primaries, and drive discussions of political issues – have gone far in that direction, according to the data from a Pew Research Center project on political polarization and the media.
The roughly 1 in 5 Americans with consistently liberal or conservative views, based on a 10-question scale of political opinions, rely on very different sources of news and information, and nearly all the sources trusted by one side are heavily distrusted by the other.
And on both sides, half or more of ideologically consistent Americans say most of their friends share their views.
Nearly half of consistent conservatives (47 percent) named Fox News as their main source of information about government and politics, and 84 percent said they got news from the cable channel in the week they were surveyed.
No single source dominates the audience on the left the way Fox dominates the right. CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the New York Times each were cited by 10 percent or more of consistent liberals as their chief sources of political and government news. Just over half of consistent liberals said they had gotten news from NPR or CNN in the week of the survey. Almost no consistent liberals cited Fox as their main source of news.
Consistent liberals overwhelmingly said they distrust Fox, and only 3 percent of consistent conservatives said they trusted the New York Times or NPR.
The survey’s finding about Fox‘s overwhelming reach among conservatives dovetails with a 2012 USC Annenberg/Los Angeles Times poll, which found that nearly half of Republicans turned to Fox at least daily. Because of its ubiquity among conservatives, getting coverage on Fox has become crucial for Republican political candidates.
Among 36 news sources in the survey, including print, online, and broadcast outlets, liberals rated 28 as more trusted than not, and conservatives trusted just eight, including Rush Limbaugh, the radio talk show host, and the online Drudge Report.
Only the Wall Street Journal, which combines a mainstream news report with a conservative editorial page, was rated as more trusted than not by people across the ideological spectrum. At the other end of the scale, one source, BuzzFeed, was more distrusted than trusted by liberals as well as conservatives and those in between, although only about one-third of those responding to the survey had heard enough about the site to have an opinion.
About many news sources, liberals and conservatives disagreed overwhelmingly. By 81 percent to 6 percent, for example, consistent liberals said they distrusted Fox; consistent conservatives trusted the cable news channel by 88 percent to 3 percent. Although only 3 percent of consistent conservatives said they trusted either the New York Times or NPR, among consistent liberals, 72 percent trusted NPR and 62 percent trusted the New York Times.
Among respondents overall, 54 percent said they trusted CNN and 50 percent trusted ABC and NBC news. No other sources were trusted by half or more of respondents, in part because many of them were not widely recognized. CBS was trusted by 46 percent overall.
The Journal‘s audience comes about equally from each part of the ideological spectrum, the survey indicated. Many other programs, websites, and other sources that people use for political information have audiences that tilt strongly in one direction or the other. Nearly three-quarters of the audience for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” for example, holds consistently or mostly liberal views. More than 80 percent of Rush Limbaugh’s audience holds consistently or mostly conservative views.
The polarization of information sources also extends to friends. Two-thirds of consistent conservatives and about half of consistent liberals said that most of their close friends shared their political views. Among consistent liberals, about one-quarter said they had stopped talking to or being friends with someone because of politics. About 1 in 6 of consistent conservatives said the same.
When asked to list three people with whom they discuss politics, half of consistent conservatives listed only people whom they identified as conservative. Just under one-third of consistent liberals listed only other liberals.
Americans who have more mixed political views don’t pay nearly as much attention to politics as those on either extreme, don’t talk about it as much with friends or family and don’t participate as much. When they do seek out news about politics and government, they rely on a more mixed array of news sources, the survey found.
Similar patterns hold true in the way people use social media, the survey found. About half of all those surveyed said that they encountered some news about government or politics on Facebook. But those who held ideological consistent views, either on the right or the left, were much more likely to pay attention to those items.
The ideologically committed were also more likely to see mostly items online that reflected their own views, largely because they are more likely to have ideologically compatible friends.
Among Americans overall, just over 1 in 5 said all or most of the posts about politics they see on Facebook are in line with their own views. But among consistent conservatives, almost half said that. Among consistent liberals, about one-third did.
The Pew study was based on an online survey this spring of 2,901 respondents selected to reflect overall U.S. demographics. The data have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.

Photo by Totenkopf/Wikimedia Commons

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6 Races Both Parties View Completely Differently

6 Races Both Parties View Completely Differently

By Nathan L. Gonzales, CQ Roll Call

While Democratic and Republican operatives have their own analysis on each race, they often agree on how close a race is and which candidate has the edge.
Sometimes, however, they have wildly different views on where races stand.
In California’s 52nd and Florida’s 2nd, for example, both parties agree the race is close and they have resigned themselves to slogging it out until the end with expensive television ad campaigns. In West Virginia’s 3rd District, the parties disagreed for months on which candidate is better-positioned to win — and now they agree Democratic Rep. Nick J. Rahall II’s re-election will be a close contest.
But when the parties disagree, their views can be fundamentally different. In at least six contests this cycle, party operatives disagree on where the races stand and where they are headed.
Here is a look at a half-dozen seats where strategists aren’t on the same page — and sometimes seem to be reading out of totally different books.

Minnesota’s 7th District. National Republicans targeted Rep. Collin C. Peterson of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party for defeat from the beginning of the cycle, since he represents an expansive rural district that supports Republicans in presidential elections. Members of the GOP continue to believe there is a path for state Rep. Torrey Westrom to win. But Democrats are quite confident that Peterson has withstood the GOP attacks and he starts the final sprint in very good shape. The Rothenberg Political Report/Roll Call rates the race as Leans Democratic.

Arkansas 2nd District. Democrats are very bullish on former North Little Rock mayor Patrick Henry Hays’ effort to take over this Republican open seat. Even though Democrats might lose the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat, the party’s House strategists believe Hays has localized his race with Republican French Hill and the Democrat may even be winning. Republicans have a different view. The Rothenberg Political Report/Roll Call rates the race as Leans Republican.

Maine’s 2nd District. Party strategists on both sides believe their nominee starts the final month of the campaign in the driver’s seat for this open seat, currently held by a Democrat. Both sides can’t be right. But we probably won’t know which side had the better analysis until either Democrat Emily Cain or Republican Bruce Poliquin wins on Nov. 4. The Rothenberg Political Report/Roll Call rates the race as Leans Democratic.

New York’s 1st District. GOP strategists believe Lee Zeldin is in terrific position to recapture this seat, which Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop has held, rather tenuously, for nearly a dozen years. But Democrats are increasingly confident that the congressman and the voters have moved beyond ethical questions and Bishop is in good shape for another term. The Rothenberg Political Report/Roll Call rates the race as Tossup/Tilts Democratic.

Iowa’s 2nd District. Republicans aren’t targeting the seat yet because they simply don’t have the money to do it. But GOP strategists believe Mariannette Miller-Meeks has an excellent chance to upset Democratic Rep. Dave Loebsack in what would be a major surprise. Democratic strategists are very skeptical, particularly in a district that President Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012. The Rothenberg Political Report/Roll Call rates the race as Currently Safe for Democrats for now.

Hawaii’s 1st District. Republican Charles Djou was elected to Congress under some quirky circumstances but lost re-election in a regular general election several months later. He is in a one-on-one matchup with Democrat Mark Takai, but some Republicans see a legitimate path to victory for Djou once again. That’s backed up by a mid-September poll for Honolulu Civil Beat that showed the Republican leading Takai, 46 percent to 42 percent. Democrats aren’t particularly worried. The Rothenberg Political Report/Roll Call rates the race as Democrat Favored for now.

AFP Photo/J Pat Carter

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