Federal Judicial Vacancies: Obama’s Record and Prospects

Abstract

President Obama is the only recent president to end the last year of his first term of office with more federal judicial vacancies than when he began.¹ Partisan debate about the causes of these continued vacancies brought the issue into the 2012 campaign.² Obama himself raised the issue as early as April 2012. Republicans debated Mitt Romney’s appointment record as governor of Massachusetts during the primary season, and by the fall both conservatives and liberals were chafing over the prospect that the election would determine future appointments to the federal judiciary.³