Fill the vacancies on the federal bench

Suppose you went to court to settle a legal dispute and there was no judge.

That's happening right now in our overworked federal courts. Criminal defendants may wait up to six months and civil litigants up to two years for their cases to come to trial because there simply aren't enough judges. You can still count on having your day in court -- but don't count on having it anytime soon.

We all depend on a fully staffed, well-qualified judiciary to dispense criminal justice and settle civil disputes. But this fundamental part of our American system of government is at risk. Federal courts are experiencing a judicial vacancy crisis of historic proportion. More than 10 percent of federal judgeships are now vacant. By some estimates, the vacancy rate could grow to 50 percent within a decade if the process of filling vacancies continues to lag and if Congress expands the federal judiciary even modestly (as it should) to meet expected caseload growth. That many courtrooms with no judges would be an injustice -- for all.

How has one of the three branches of our government -- the judiciary -- come to this crisis? Simple: The other two branches of government have failed to do their jobs effectively. There are currently nearly 90 vacant seats on our federal trial and appellate courts with some 20 more seats to become vacant in the next year. The president has yet to make nominations for about half of these seats, including two on the U.S. District Court for Nevada. Several vacancies have been pending without nominees for more than a year. For those vacancies with nominees, the Senate has not moved forward with confirmation votes in a timely way. While the pace of judicial confirmations has increased since the new Congress convened in January, and Sen. Harry Reid and other Senate leaders -- of both parties -- deserve credit for this, much more work still needs to be done to resolve the vacancy crisis.

First, the president needs to step up the pace of nominations. In the 9th Circuit, which includes Nevada, there are 20 current or impending judicial vacancies of which 13 have no nominee. Four of these vacancies are on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's busiest appellate court. In our neighboring district of Arizona, there are three vacancies (one caused by the murder of Chief Judge John Roll in January), leading the court there to declare a judicial emergency. The president must do his part to address promptly the emergency in Arizona and the broader vacancy crisis.

Second, the Senate leadership needs to step up the pace of confirmation votes. The Senate should schedule votes for all pending nominees. It is the president's prerogative to make judicial nominations and the Senate's job to decide whether or not to confirm a particular nominee. It is no one's job to endlessly obstruct an eventual up-or-down vote. The Senate has procedures for cutting off debate and bringing even controversial nominees to a vote. Sen. Reid deserves credit for invoking these "cloture" procedures recently and he should not hesitate to do so again if necessary.

Filling vacancies on our federal courts should not be a partisan food fight. For more than 200 years, across the waxing and waning of political parties, the executive and legislative branches have cooperated to fill judicial vacancies as they arise. We need them to do so again now or the federal judiciary, a beacon of justice around the world, will falter, and all of us will lose.

Oscar B. Goodman, an attorney, is mayor of Las Vegas. Janet L. Chubb is a Reno lawyer who serves on the 9th Circuit Lawyer Advisory Board.