Roll Call: Senate Democrats look to close judicial confirmation gap
This excerpt is from a piece that originally ran on April 8, 2024.
If the Senate confirms three more nominees, Biden will have matched Trump at this point with 193 lifetime judicial confirmations, according to tracking from groups Alliance For Justice and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
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Jake Faleschini, justice program director at the progressive Alliance For Justice, said Manchin’s comments will make every vote “a little bit more challenging,” but it is not “an earth-shattering revelation” given his past voting record.
Although the West Virginia Democrat has not voted to confirm a party-line judicial nominee since last November, his public comments could embolden Republicans to be more aggressive in trying to block party-line nominees, with conservatives knowing they will have Manchin on their side in those situations, Faleschini said.
“It’s a little challenging in that respect because I think it really emboldens Republicans to be completely obstructionist, and to know that they’ll have Manchin on board with them if they do that,” Faleschini said.
“And so it really empowers the kind of right-wing judicial infrastructure to go hard on every single nominee that they possibly can in order to peel off any other Democrat that they can on those votes,” he said.