Of course not

This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions:

If you’re pro-choice, and you’ve openly admitted that fact, you probably shouldn’t plan on becoming a federal judge.

At least, that’s the lesson any reasonable observer would draw from the last several years. In a stark contract to President George W. Bush, who successfully appointed some of the nation’s leading judicial opponents of abortion rights to federal courts of appeals and the Supreme Court, President Obama’s been remarkably reluctant to nominate judges with demonstrably pro-choice records. That doesn’t mean that his judges oppose abortion rights, but it does mean that the best way to secure a nomination is to spend your career in the reproductive rights closet.

Which is why the nomination of Georgetown Law Professor Nina Pillard to the second most powerful court in the country is so remarkable. Pillard is one of the nation’s leading women’s rights attorneys, and she won one of the most important anti-gender stereotyping cases to reach the Supreme Court in the last few decades. She’s also openly and proudly supportive of women’s reproductive freedom. “[R]eproductive rights,” she explains in a law review article that’s been widely criticized by conservatives, “really are fundamentally about sex equality.” These rights, including the rights to contraception and abortion, “allow women to decide whether and when to follow the path of motherhood.”

Nominees like this do not come along every year — or even every third year. And if Senate Republicans get their way, they won’t come along again, period.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is expected to call a vote to break the filibuster on Pillard’s nomination as soon as next Tuesday. She is one of three nominees caught in a larger battle over which party will control the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Currently, Republicans dominate this court, and they’ve wielded this dominance to block environmental regulations that would save tens of thousands of lives, to undermine unions and to limit women’s access to birth control. If Pillard and her fellow nominees are confirmed to the three empty seats on this court, however, Democratic nominees will have the votes required to reverse ideological decisions from the court’s conservative bloc.

Senate Republicans don’t want that to happen, and Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn even openly admitted that he plans to filibuster all three of Obama’s nominees so that new confirmations won’t “switch the majority” on this Republican-controlled court. Most Senate Republicans, however, have stuck to a less partisan message to explain their filibusters — they claim that the DC Circuit is underworked, citing statistics indicating that the court hears fewer overall cases than some other federal appeals courts. This claim, however, is irrelevant. The reality is that the DC Circuit hears an unusually large number of time-consuming national security and regulatory cases — some of which require the judges and their aides to review records that literally take up entire rooms.

Moreover, it’s hard to ignore the fact that, when President Bush was naming judges, many of these same Republican senators voted to confirm a total of 11 active judges to the DC Circuit. Now that a Democrat is naming judges, however, they suddenly believe that the court can get by with just 8.