Fill judicial vacancies, including the one in Tennessee
What if 5 percent of all the jobs in your workplace were left unfilled? Projects would still need to get done. Each worker would need to take up the slack for the missing employees until the posts were filled.
For the federal judiciary, this is not just a hypothetical situation — it’s a lived reality every day. With more than 40 vacant seats on the federal bench, our judicial branch is under substantial strain.
High school civics made it seem simple. Our Founding Fathers crafted a system of three branches: executive, legislative and judicial. Each of these separate branches was vested with distinct powers with which they could check and balance each other. Within this system of checks and balances, each branch is assumed to be operating at full strength to carry out the business of government.
When vacancies occur, it can hamstring the ability of branches to do their job and, by extension, check against the concentration of power in the other branches.
John Adams, writing in 1776, argued that the dignity and stability of government depended on the upright and skillful administration of justice.
Currently, our judicial branch is so overburdened that it has declared 12 judicial emergencies across the country. With millions of Americans living in jurisdictions with these overworked jurists, the strain of ever-expanding dockets weighs on those upon whom we rely for the skillful administration of justice.
The new Congress is currently considering 15 new judicial nominees to fill vacant seats on the federal bench.
One of those vacant seats is in Chattanooga, where the retirement of Judge Curtis Collier this past October has created an opening in the Eastern District of Tennessee. Travis Randall McDonough, Mayor Andy Burke’s chief of staff and counselor, has been nominated for the post.
A graduate of Vanderbilt Law School, McDonough practiced at Miller & Martin and headed its litigation department before his role in city government.
His credentials, like those of the other judicial nominees, ought to qualify him for the post to which he has been nominated. Unfortunately, politics may get in the way of McDonough and other qualified nominees from filling these vacancies.
Our system stands as a divided government, with a Democrat in the White House and Republicans controlling the Congress. Ideally, the administration of justice would be outside the fray of partisan fighting.
As Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury v. Madison, it is the “province and the duty of the judiciary to say what the law is” as it upholds and interprets the Constitution.
Judicial confirmations, especially those of Supreme Court Justices, have turned into political sideshows. In the hope of scoring political points today, politicians all too often neglect to appreciate the day-to-day strains for litigants and the courts that arise from current judicial vacancies.
Like any organization, a government branch missing key personnel will operate with diminished efficiency. As dockets continue to grow, vacant judgeships mean cases may take longer to resolve. At the very least, current Article III judges and their clerks will need to work that much harder to fill the gaps left by vacant seats.
As our government relies on separate, equal branches, we should encourage the review of qualified judicial nominees based on their qualifications, not the politics of the moment.
Tennessee Senators Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander, a former mayor of Chattanooga and an attorney, respectively, should recognize the contribution that McDonough could make to the bench in East Tennessee.
Even with our divided government, let’s push our politicians to govern responsibly and consider judicial nominees on their merits.
Tommy Tobin is a 2006 graduate of the McCallie School in Chattanooga and currently attends Harvard Law School, where he is a teaching fellow in the Harvard Economics Department.