More on the L.A. Times’s Distortion of Obama’s Judicial Confirmation Statistics
I e-mailed Ed Whelan my post on the L.A. Times‘s distortion of statistics on judicial confirmation rates. Whelan followed up, and now provides evidence that Carol J. Williams, a reporter who once so badly botched an analysis of a court decision that the paper ran a four-paragraph correction, screwed the pooch again in her recent article where she said:
Obama’s judicial confirmation rate is the lowest since analysts began detailed tracking the subject 30 years ago, with 47% of his 85 nominations winning Senate approval so far. That compares with 87% confirmed during the first 18 months of the previous administration, 84% for President Clinton, 79% for President George H.W. Bush and 93% for President Reagan.
Let me turn the bullhorn over to Whelan:
The article’s assertion that President George W. Bush had 87% of his early judicial nominees “confirmed during the first 18 months of [his] administration” struck me as farfetched. And it turns out that it is wildly wrong. Specifically (by my quick count, which may not be perfect but should be very close), President Bush nominated some 112 judges during his first 18 months (32 to the courts of appeals and 80 to the district courts), and 64 of these (13* to the courts of appeals and 51 to the district courts) were confirmed during the first 18 months of his administration. That yields an overall figure of 57%, not 87% (and the figure for the courts of appeals was just under 41%).
I think we’ve reached the point where an e-mail to the Readers’ Representative is called for. Who wants to handle it? readers.representative@latimes.com. If you send anything, copy me.
59 Democratic votes against 41 Republican votes and Obama can’t get his judges approved. I guess his inexperience as an executive shows in many ways outside of ruining our economy and endangering our national security as Hillary Clinton asserted yesterday.
Who could have known?
whocares (2d1b4f) — 9/9/2010 @ 10:18 amYou want someone to write to the “readers’ representative”?
First you’ll have to find someone who reads it. Good luck with that.
Gesundheit (cfa313) — 9/9/2010 @ 12:06 pmWhocares misunderstands…that’s cool. It’s not about Obama; it’s about the Republicans your comment intimates are just powerless. As Steve Benen (warning: he’s an evil liberal) noted:
As just Kennedy noted: Many of these courts are already completely overworked: Justice Kennedy highlighted the Eastern District of California, where five judges are handling a workload of fifteen judges. Still, a nominee to that court, Kimberly Mueller, who was reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in early May without opposition, has now been waiting four months for a vote on the Senate floor, with no end in sight
Mindless obstructionism should have real world consequences and if you unaware that holds are placed on these judges by Richard Shelby and friends as they play a “four corners” defense on the Obama presidency, then you don’t know much about the way the Senate works,…..errr, doesn’t work.
Still, I doubt the next Republican President’s partisan friends will lack knowledge about mindless obstructionism works since the media will be full of stories about how these poor darling conservative judges can’t get approved. If it’s good for the goose, I suspect the gander will try it too. Welcome to America under scorched earth silly politics.
timb (449046) — 9/9/2010 @ 3:41 pmtimb – “If it’s good for the goose, I suspect the gander will try it too.”
What… were you born in 2009?
If you had bothered to read the post, you would have found that those poor darling ’empathetic to the point of just re-writing (and/ior completely ignoring) laws to suit the moment’ liberal judges are getting approved at a similar rate as conservative one’s were under Bush – despite the LA Times out and out lying to obscure that fact.
What was good for the conservative goose – is already causing the gander to squeal like a stuck pig (as well as causing left wing news sources and so called ‘journalists’ to lie to obscure that fact).
twyger (463a9d) — 9/9/2010 @ 4:27 pmIf facts can be made up to suit an SAT essay that gets you into journalism school, why not make them up here? It was still a good well-written article, wasn’t it?
Amphipolis (b120ce) — 9/10/2010 @ 7:35 am