WASHINGTON-North Carolina’s two Republican senators on Thursday pressured Democratic leaders to schedule a confirmation hearing for a conservative North Carolina judge nominated for the federal bench almost a year ago.
Judge Robert J. Conrad was nominated by President Bush in July to fill one of four open slots on a federal appeals court that covers the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland.
“No individual should have their lives on hold for 338 days like Bob Conrad,” Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said at a press conference. “It’s time to lay politics aside and fill this very important vacancy.”
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chair of the Senate judiciary committee, said in an April letter to Burr and Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C., that he was working to fill a long list of vacancies in federal courts across the country that existed before Democrats recaptured the Senate in 2006.
“With your cooperation in the years ahead, I am confident we will be able to fill the remaining vacancies in the Federal courts in North Carolina,” he wrote.
The four seats open on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, he said, are a holdover from the 1990s. Republicans, then in control of the Senate, repeatedly refused to confirm judges nominated by President Clinton. Though Republicans controlled the Senate through much of the Bush administration, the seats have remained open.
Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond Law School, said the dispute delaying Conrad’s confirmation is far bigger than one judge.
“We’re just at the end of a long series of political paybacks on the 4th Circuit that go back to the Clinton administration, or even earlier,” he said. “There’s plenty of blame to go around.”
Conrad, who currently serves as chief judge of a lower federal court in Western North Carolina, could not be reached for comment Thursday. Dole, however, complained that Conrad, “has not been given the courtesy of a hearing.”
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., the top Republican on the judiciary committee, said he suspected Leahy did not have a problem with Conrad specifically.
“This is a concerted effort to keep these seats open” so that Barack Obama, should he win in the fall, could appoint less conservative nominees, Specter said in a brief interview.
Several reproductive rights groups, including Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America, opposed Conrad’s 2005 confirmation to a federal district court seat in Western North Carolina because of his conservative anti-abortion views.
He was confirmed to that seat only after former Sen. John Edwards, who opposed his nomination, was replaced by Burr in the Senate.
Several opposing groups have objected to a newspaper op-ed piece Conrad wrote calling Planned Parenthood a “radical, pro-abortion fringe group” and to his association with a pregnancy center in Virginia that gave misleading information about health risks associated with abortion.
