The hand wringing about how Obama isn’t using his opportunity to push through liberal judges (or even many judges at all) misses the point.
If he couldn’t even be bothered to replace the majority of the Justice Department’s USA’s, men and women chosen by Bush for their partisan credentials, which is completely within his purview and not subject to Republican filibustering, why would anyone think that he wants to push the courts to the left?
Howard
Small correction – justices only sit on Supreme Court, all other federal courts have judges.
lambert strether
Why? Because they’re delusional? Could that be it?
BDBlue
Delusion and propaganda. To be more generous, I think it’s a delusion built on their own hopes about what would come after Bush. They believed it would get better and all of these great things would happen for so long, they can’t quite believe they aren’t happening. That’s the delusion side.
The propaganda side is the number of people who have their careers invested in selling Obama and so they cannot admit that he’s not interested in doing X great thing because then the deluded people might not love Obama anymore and that’s bad for their business model.
jo6pac
Yep, BDBlue it’s all about branding and not change we can believe in, not that I ever did. Business as usual.
Ian Welsh
Ah, thanks Howard.
someofparts
Of all the things Obama has/hasn’t done, that single thing, leaving those USAs in place, was the one that ended his credibility for me.
Formerly T-Bear
Projecting forward, it probably is not in the distant future that conflict resolution will be handled by other institutions so it makes little sense to waste the effort now on soon to be extinct extravagance. Most conflict will be handled directly by the emerging police state and its reign of taser terror, backed by martial law enforced by an engorged military upon a cowed, dummified, inarticulate, historically adrift population drowning in beliefs and myths.
Clearly the law is broken, only the inertia of the vast enterprise and population of practitioners provides any substance or appearance of function. Telltale sign of broken has to be the emergence of dual or more accurately multiple levels of application and enforcement, the edifice of law is shattered. The government will not enforce the law on its preceding administration for clearly admitted violation of constitution and treaty. This itself invalidates any government’s claim to legitimacy. It will only get worse from this point, it will not end well.
The Tragically Flip
USA’s are subject to filibuster. They’re Senate confirmed positions.
Still, that Obama didn’t fire the lot of the Bushies and then let a few attack dogs in the Senate demagogue the Republicans if they don’t let the replacements get confirmed for putting the nation at risk by not having enough prosecutors catching crooks and terrorists is beyond me.
Antipesto
TTF:
Because he had no desire to replace them in the first place.
Sadly, but unsurprisingly.
David Kowalski
Failure to replace Chris Christie’s hand-picked successor for a year was a major contributing factor in Chrisitie’s election. One Republican Senator held the replacement off.
During that year, the Rove-mandated witch hunt of Democratic officials (which kept Chrisite his job) continued. Democratic officials in several key counties, particularly Hudson and Middlesex, drastically ratcheted get out the vote operations last November because of fear of prosecution (this according to the mostly pro-Christie Newark Star-Ledger).
The ultimate replacement turned out to be a non-partisan Democrat who had served in Republican administrations. I want an attack dog to keep Christie honest. The Whitman era Republicans certainly were not.