President Obama no doubt has quite a bit on his policy plate, what with climate change legislation, the economy, health care reform, winding down a war in Iraq and ramping up one in Afghanistan.
But we certainly hope that doesn’t mean Colorado’s federal courts will suffer.
Last week, Colorado’s Sens. Michael Bennet and Mark Udall submitted to the White House the names of six candidates for two vacant judgeships on the states’s U.S. District Court bench.
The conventional wisdom is that it will take a while for the administration to get around to vetting those candidates and forwarding its choices to the Senate for confirmation.
Let’s hope that’s not the case. The judicial vacancies, particularly in Colorado, were not a last-minute surprise. They were known last year.
Filling them should have been part of the president’s immediate game plan.
It’s true that some of the matters that the president is having to deal with were not of his making, such as the recession.
However, it’s also clear President Obama, who has great ambitions to reshape public policy, has taken on some matters of his own volition. Legislation putting a price on carbon emissions is a case in point, as is health care reform.
Chief Judge Lewis T. Babcock had made clear more than two years ago that he intended to take senior status in 2008, a semi-retirement in which federal judges typically assume a reduced caseload.
Edward W. Nottingham Jr. resigned last October amid allegations of strip club visits and trysts with hookers.
Colorado’s U.S. District Court has seven full-time active Article III judges, and having two of those positions unfilled is a significant reduction.
Choosing federal judges has become an unwieldy and divisive process in recent years. However, Colorado has taken steps to blunt the influence of politics in choosing nominees for the president to consider.
To vet Colorado candidates, Udall and Bennet assembled a bipartisan advisory panel, co-chaired by two well-respected legal minds — Hal Haddon, a Denver lawyer, and Rebecca Love Kourlis, a former Colorado Supreme Court justice.
They considered 37 applicants, and forwarded three names for each of the two vacancies.
The candidates are: Denver District Judges Christina Habas and Morris Hoffman; Boulder District Judge Lael Montgomery; R. Brooke Jackson, chief judge of the 1st Judicial District in Jefferson County; William Martinez, partner at McNamara, Roseman, Martinez & Kazmierski LLP in Denver; and John F. Walsh, partner at Hill & Robbins in Denver and a former federal prosecutor.
To date, the president has nominated only eight people for 76 judicial vacancies across the country.
Congress takes a summer recess in August, and the White House is consumed, it seems, with pushing Sonia Sotomayor for a U.S. Supreme Court slot, so the odds are heavily stacked against seeing the Colorado nominees moving forward before this fall.
That’s a disappointing realization, and we hope the White House will see fit to put these judgeships on the top of the priority list so Colorado’s federal courts don’t bog down.
