^ Fandos, Nicholas (December 18, 2018). "Senate Passes Bipartisan Criminal Justice Bill". The New York Times. In one of this Congress's final acts, every Democrat and all but 12 Republicans voted in favor of the legislation — an outcome that looked highly unlikely this month amid skepticism from Republican leaders.
The Senate under GOP control approved only 22 judges in that two-year period, the lowest total since 1951-52 in the last year of President Truman’s term. By contrast, the Senate under Democratic control approved 68 judges in the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency. The best-known vacancy was on the Supreme Court.
^ "President Clinton today announced his intent to nominate G. Douglas Jones to serve as United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama" (Press release). White House Office of the Press Secretary.
O'BRIEN: JUDGE JACKSON IS THE ADVOCATE WORKERS NEED ON U. SUPREME COURTPR NewswireWASHINGTON, April 6, 2022WASHINGTON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The following is a statement from Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien on the full Senate's consideration of D.
Jones won the special election by 22,000 votes, 50%–48%. At the time, Jones was the only statewide elected Democrat in Alabama and the first Democrat to win statewide office since Lucy Baxley was elected President of the Alabama Public Service Commission in 2008.
On September 19, 2019, Jones took to the Senate floor to request unanimous consent to pass legislation that would further the $255 million in federal funding for minority-serving colleges and universities ahead of its expiration date in weeks. The vote was shut down by Senate Education Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, who instead called for support for the passage of "a long-term solution that will provide certainty to college presidents and their students" and "a few additional bipartisan higher education proposals."
A key piece of evidence was a tape from the time of the bombing in which Blanton said he had plotted with others to make the bomb. Jones was deputized to argue in state court and indicted Blanton and Cherry in 2000. Blanton was found guilty in 2001 and Cherry in 2002. Both were sentenced to life in prison.
In December 2018, Jones voted for the First Step Act, legislation aimed at reducing recidivism rates among federal prisoners by expanding job training and other programs in addition to expanding early-release programs and modifying sentencing laws such as mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, "to more equitably punish drug offenders."
Jones supports the reversal of mandatory three-strikes laws for nonviolent offenses to give judges flexibility in giving sentences.
After Words interview with Jones on Bending Toward Justice, March 9, 2019, C-SPAN. Jones recounts the history of the bombings and his subsequent involvement in Blanton and Cherry's prosecution in his 2019 book Bending Toward Justice: The Birmingham Church Bombing that Changed the Course of Civil Rights.
He is a member of Beta Theta Pi. Jones' s political career began as staff counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for Alabama Senator Howell Heflin. Jones then worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney from 1980 to 1984 before resigning to work at a private law firm in Birmingham, Alabama, from 1984 to 1997.
Trump and McConnell have succeeded in pushing judicial nominees through the Senate because the Republicans have voted in lockstep since taking control of the chamber in 2014.
Last month, when the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on several other nominations, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked Talley about his fervent advocacy of gun rights. In a blog post titled “A Call to Arms,” he wrote that “the President and his democratic allies in Congress are about to launch the greatest attack on our constitutional freedoms in our lifetime,” referring to Obama’s proposal for background checks and limits on rapid-fire weapons following the 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
By November 2009, Obama had made 27 judicial nominations, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Trump has nominated 59 people to the federal courts, including Justice Gorsuch. That’s also a contrast with Trump’s pace in filling executive branch jobs, where he has lagged far behind the pace of previous administrations.
Civil rights groups and liberal advocates see the matter differently. They denounced Thursday’s vote, calling it “laughable” that none of the committee Republicans objected to confirming a lawyer with as little experience as Talley to preside over federal trials.
Trump filled the seat this year with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.
Some conservatives discount the ABA’s rating. “The ABA is a liberal interest group. They have a long history of giving lower ratings to Republican nominees,” said Carrie Severino, counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network, which supports Trump’s nominees. She said past liberal nominees have been rated as qualified even if they had little or no courtroom experience.
And, like many people who eventually became federal judges, he became the protege of someone who became a senator. In Talley’s case, the mentor was Republican Sen. Luther Strange, the former Alabama state attorney general who was appointed to the Senate in February to replace Jeff Sessions, who left the Senate to become U.S. attorney general.
But by the time Trump picked him to replace Kennedy, he had spent 12 years on the appellate court and written hundreds of opinions. Trump’s other appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, had been an appellate court judge for 11 years before Trump nominated him to fill the seat vacated by the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
By almost any objective measure, Barrett is the most inexperienced person nominated to the Supreme Court since 1991, when President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, then just 43, to replace the legendary Thurgood Marshall.
To help him fill the bench with religious conservatives, he turned to the Federalist Society , a conservative legal organization established in 1982 that over the years has been funded with millions of dollars in dark money donations in an effort to stack the federal courts with conservative and libertarian judges for decades to come.
During her confirmation hearing, Pitlyk explained that she had never taken a deposition or tried a case because she had arranged her schedule to spend more time with her four children. During her Senate testimony she described herself as “very fortunate” for having had the opportunity to work “at small firms with very accommodating and flexible colleagues who want the best for me and for my family in addition to the best for our clients. I have had the luxury of getting to be as protected as possible and as supported as possible by my colleagues.”
Kagan later spent four years working in the Clinton White House, first as associate White House counsel and later at the domestic policy counsel. Clinton nominated her to a seat on the DC Circuit in 1999, but the GOP-led Senate never acted on the nomination. When Obama tapped her for the Supreme Court, critics complained that Kagan, like Barrett, had never tried a case. But unlike Barrett, Kagan had no trouble satisfying the Judiciary Committee’s questions about the most notable 10 cases she’d worked on in private practice at the Washington, DC, law firm Williams & Connolly before she went into academia. At the time of her nomination, she was the solicitor general, the first woman to hold the post, where she argued frequently before the Supreme Court, wrote briefs, and oversaw the work of nearly two dozen lawyers before the high court.
Chief Justice John Roberts rustled up 75,000 pages of records for his 2005 confirmation hearing—just from his time serving in Republican administrations. The Senate reviewed about 170,000 pages of records before confirming Justice Elena Kagan and 180,000 for Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Barrett first joined the Federalist Society in 2005 and then again in 2014, after which she set off on an extensive speaking tour sponsored by the conservative legal outfit—a tour that bears all the hallmarks of a political campaign, only one targeted at the unelected post of Supreme Court justice.