While doing some research on Donald Trump’s judicial nominations — they’ve been as white and male as you’d expect, particularly in the 8th Circuit, which numbers exactly one woman and one African-American among the ultra-conservative cohort that governs federal law in Arkansas — I  asked Glenn Sugameli of Judging the Environment about vacancies on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, a little-known but important tribunal. Sen. Tom Cotton single-handedly blocked Barack Obama appointments to the court for more than two years.

Trump has nominated two men to the court. They’ve cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee on party-line votes. One of them, Damien Schiff, is particularly controversial, Sugameli notes on his website.

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President Trump has nominated Damien M. Schiff, Senior Attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation and member of The Federalist Society, for a seat on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. As noted in his Senate Judiciary Questionnaire, in a series of blog posts on both the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Liberty Blog and his own personal blog entitled Omnia Omnibus, as well as in other writings, Schiff repeatedly demonstrates his extreme views and his unfitness to serve as a judge. First, Schiff’s writings include personal attacks on the integrity of a sitting Supreme Court justice, advocates, and progressives. This alone demonstrates he lacks the judicial temperament to serve as a judge. Second, Schiff’s writings demonstrate a blatant disregard for the importance of critical rights and protections relied on by millions of Americans and an extreme devotion to political ideology. Finally, Schiff, who has devoted his career to weakening environmental laws and other legal protections, has made clear that he believes the role of a judge is not to neutrally apply facts to the law. Rather, he has called for a “reinvigorated constitutional jurisprudence, emanating from the judiciary” that would “overturn precedents upon which many of the unconstitutional excrescences of the New Deal and Great Society eras depend.”

When the Trump nominees reach the floor, what will Tom Cotton do? He blocked all five Obama nominees, including the first Latino nominee. He claimed not to oppose them. Rather, he said, the court caseload did not justify filling ANY of the empty seats

Sugameli commented in an e-mail to me:

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IF Sen. Cotton has any integrity at all, he will surely block President Trump’s Court of Federal Claims nominees for the same reason he blocked President Obama’s. After all, Sen. Cotton did not object to any of the Obama nominees but argued that the caseload did not justify filling any of the five empty seats.

If Sen. Cotton does not block President Trump’s nominees, the only reason would appear to be based in The Roll Call newspaper report that Sen. Cotton’s actions “line[d] up well with the interests of one of his old law firms” whose “employees gave significant political contributions to Cotton.

Pretty big if.

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