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World’s largest gavel, outside courthouse in Columbus, Ohio

On July 8, the Senate voted 47 to 43 to confirm an incompetent left-wing trial court judge to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. No Republicans voted for her, and even two Senators elected as Democrats — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — voted against her. So how did she get confirmed? Because eight of the 49 Republican Senators were absent and thus didn’t vote against her!

Most Democratic senators voted for this judge because she is Hispanic and will be the first Hispanic judge to sit on the Seventh Circuit appeals court. The fact that she is a Hispanic woman matters more to them than her incompetence. Progressive senators are not troubled by the fact that she delays many months before issuing rulings, making her slower than 99% of all federal trial judges.

Judge Nancy Maldonado is much slower to issue rulings, than even judges with much bigger workloads, such as judges in border areas where courts are overwhelmed with drug and immigration cases, where big case loads sometimes lead to delays in issuing a ruling. Even those overwhelmed judges issue rulings much faster than she does, despite having far more cases to handle. The unfortunate people whose cases were delayed due to Judge Maldonado’s utter slowness include Hispanic fraud victims, so it is perverse for progressive Democrats to depict her appointment as a win for Hispanics. Her appointment is a defeat for merit, judicial quality, and the rule of law.

Reuters reports:

The Democratic-led U.S. Senate on Monday voted in favor of U.S. District Judge Nancy Maldonado becoming the first Hispanic judge on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals over the objections of Republicans who have highlighted her large trial court case backlog.

The Senate voted 47-43 to confirm Maldonado to a seat on the court, which hears appeals arising out of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. She is the fifth judge appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden’s to be confirmed to the court.

She was championed by Illinois’ senior senator, Dick Durbin, who is the Senate Judiciary Committee’s chair and the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate. He had also backed her 2022 nomination by Biden to serve as a federal district court judge in Chicago…Senate Republicans argued [her] decisions often took too long to be issued and that she had proved herself unfit to join the 7th Circuit after amassing the worst case backlog of any district court judge within its jurisdiction.

“Why on earth would our colleagues consider giving new and greater responsibilities to a judge who’s clearly struggling with the ones she’s already got?” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor on June 4.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee in March, Republicans pressed Maldonado on why she ranked nationally as the district court judge with the seventh highest number of civil motions pending for over six months without a ruling.

Her 125 motions pending were detailed in a semi-annual report the judiciary produces pursuant to the Civil Justice Reform Act that details the extent to which federal judges have not ruled on long-pending motions in civil cases.

That law was sponsored by Biden when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, a point McConnell stressed in saying the reforms Biden backed in 1990 had revealed that his own nominee had “distinguished herself with sheer incompetence.”

As lawyer Carrie Severino notes,

Democrats just promoted a radical and incompetent judge to a lifetime position on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals with only 47 votes. How? Because 8 Republican Senators didn’t show up to vote against Nancy Maldonado. With less than 6 months remaining in President Biden’s term, Senate Republicans must show up and present a united front against judicial nominees who pose a threat to the rule of law and our Constitution.

As a lawyers group points out, “Nancy Maldonado has proven to be incapable of handling the workload of a federal judge…she is ‘beyond the 99th percentile of all district judges nationwide in terms of slowness.’”

As Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) observed, ““Judge Nancy Maldonado, a trial judge nominated to the Seventh Circuit, has distinguished herself with sheer incompetence.”

Other judges chosen by President Biden worked with Marxist organizations, such as one that called for abolishing prisons and the police.

A judge Biden appointed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — the federal appeals court with the largest geographic jurisdiction — was the director of a group that seeks to abolish prisons prior to being appointed by Biden.