In my new Confirmation Tales post, I take a close look at the statistics on Bill Clinton’s lower-court appointments. The statistics tell a mixed story. Some excerpts:
Over his eight years, Clinton appointed 396 lower-court judges. That total exceeds Ronald Reagan’s eight-year total of 373 lower-court judges…. Clinton’s besting of Reagan is all the more noteworthy in light of the fact that Clinton faced a Republican-controlled Senate during his last six years while Reagan faced a Democrat-controlled Senate only during his last two years….
There were forty fewer judicial vacancies (67) at the end of Clinton’s presidency than there were at the beginning (107). That’s a decline of nearly 40%….
The statistics suggest that Republicans had some success in blocking appellate nominees.
Although Clinton overall appointed 23 more lower-court judges than Reagan, his total of appellate judges was 18 less—65 for Clinton, 83 for Reagan. To put the point another way, only 16% of Clinton’s lower-court appointees were appellate judges, as compared to 22% of Reagan’s.
Likewise, whereas only 16% of the judicial vacancies that Clinton inherited were appellate, a full one-third (26 of 78) of the vacancies at the end of his term were appellate….
In June 1999, Clinton nominated an obscure but very talented 39-year-old law-professor-turned-White-House-staffer to a vacancy on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. That nominee did not receive a confirmation hearing, and the nomination was returned to the White House after the 2000 presidential election.
As with John Roberts’s failed nomination to the D.C. Circuit in 1992, one has to wonder whether Elena Kagan’s ultimate path to the Supreme Court was made easier because she did not have a long judicial record (in her case, any judicial record) that might have put some obstacles in her way.
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