The U.S. Senate is setting a new record for inaction on a Supreme Court justice nomination this week. Today marks 125 days since President Obama submitted the name of Merrick Garland (pictured at left) to serve on the Court — a man that even conservative Republicans admit is beyond highly qualified. He has yet to receive even a hearing in the Judiciary Committee.
Now, more than four months later, the Court lists along with only eight justices — just as numerous other federal courts around the country try to get by without their full complements of judges as a result of conservative obstructionism in the Senate.
Here in North Carolina, we are, sadly, home to two of the chief obstructionists. Senator Richard Burr (at left) has not only refused to even address the Garland nomination in anything approaching a thorough way, he has been blocking nominees to the federal court in the state’s eastern district for a full decade now.
Meanwhile, Burr’s junior partner, Thom Tillis (lower left) made national headlines last week
(see the cartoon below) with his asinine comment that Senate consideration of judicial nominations has “nothing to do with us doing our jobs.”
The bottom line: North Carolina’s U.S. senators are not only not doing their jobs, they clearly don’t even understand what their jobs entail.
