Republican Senators are looking to show that they have any interest in responsible governance before November’s election, this is the last week for them to show it.

Currently, 23 of President Obama’s judicial nominees are waiting for a vote by the full Senate.  Nineteen of those nominations have been pending for more than five months, some for nearly a year.  Eleven of those nominations are to fill vacancies designated “judicial emergencies.”

“Since the day President Obama took office, the GOP has been throwing sand into the gears of government,” said Marge Baker of People For the American Way.  “They’ve decided that they can collect electoral dividends if they keep the government stuck in gridlock—nowhere has that been clearer than in the area of judicial nominations.

“President Obama has nominated dozens of clearly qualified, clearly mainstream nominees. Yet the GOP has waged an unprecedented campaign to prevent those nominees from reaching the bench. This campaign is not about ideology. Seventeen of the 23 nominees currently stalled on the Senate floor were voted out of the Judiciary Committee without a single ‘no’ vote. This is about obstructionism, pure and simple.

“Republicans in Congress have shown that they are willing to sacrifice even the basic functioning of the U.S. government in order to score political points. That’s not the kind of responsibility and leadership you’d expect from a party that wants to lead the country.”

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