Recently, we reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was going to some pretty great lengths to get as many of his hand-picked federal judges confirmed to a seat as humanly possible as the very real chance of a lost reelection bid for Donald Trump looms over his head.
Such great lengths, in fact, that reports at the time indicated that the Kentucky Senator was heavily urging several federal judges who were close to retirement to go ahead and bite the bullet a bit early, in an effort to ensure that the judges were replaced with McConnell’s own pick before the GOP/Trump agenda completely dissolves.
Then, just days before one of his picks for a recent vacancy in the federal appeals court was set to be considered for nomination by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the chief justice of the high court requested an investigation into McConnell’s likely role in the seat’s vacancy.
The Louisville Courier-Journal reports that the progressive judicial watchdog group, Demand Justice, asked that the hearing regarding Judge Justin Walker of Louisville’s nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that was scheduled for the next day be postponed in an effort to investigate the Senator’s push for the vacancy.
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“The chief judge of that court issued a public order May 1 asking U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts to transfer to another circuit Demand Justice’s allegation that a judge on the court may have been persuaded to retire to allow another judge to take his seat,” the Courier-Journal reports. “The order, a copy of which The Courier-Journal obtained Monday night, does not mention Walker by name.”
The New York Times reported that the court’s Obama-appointed chief judge, Sri Srinivasan, “has referred Demand Justice’s request for an investigation to Roberts so it can be transferred to another circuit for review and disposition.”
“Justin Walker’s nomination was already controversial, but this emerging investigation means an even darker cloud is hanging over his appointment. The hearing on Walker’s nomination should not go forward until we know the truth about what ethical lines Mitch McConnell crossed to get Walker this seat,” Demand Justice stated in a news release.
They went on to say that McConnell should, at the very least, “come clean about whether and when he contacted Judge Thomas Griffith prior to his sudden retirement.”
It seems that McConnell’s desperation to cling tight to the rapidly evaporating MAGA 2020 agenda has finally bit him in the ass.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Flick/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
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