US Senate confirms Maldonado to be first Hispanic judge on 7th Circuit
By Nate Raymond
July 8 (Reuters) -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.
Durbin has called her an "accomplished litigator and a distinguished jurist" worthy of a promotion based on her nearly two decades oflitigating cases at the law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland and careful approach to deciding cases as a judge.
But Senate Republicans argued those 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."
In testimony and a subsequent written submission to the Judiciary Committee, Maldonado stressed that she came onto the bench when COVID-19 restrictions that had delayed court proceedings were still in effect.
She was immediately assigned about 300 cases and then was reassigned a "highly unusual" additional number of cases when three judges left the bench in late 2022. Local rules barred reassigning cases again within a 12-month period.
Durbin at a committee hearing in April said that Maldonado had presided over about 1,000 cases and resolved hundreds of matters without appellate reversal, writing "opinions that carefully apply the law to the facts."
Read more:
Senate Republicans grill 7th Circuit nominee on her trial court backlog
Biden nominates Chicago judge to be first Hispanic judge
Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston
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