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the nominee or the bill. Instead, bills and nominations are held hostage because a Senator is
trying to leverage something from the Administration or from another Senator. These so-called
‘leverage holds’ are routinely used by members from both parties.”
54
And, given the previous
elaboration of the myriad of reasons why confirmations might be delayed that have nothing to do
with nominee-based objections, it is quite probable that many “holds” on judicial confirmations
may be used to gain leverage or enact retribution. Thus, the remainder of this paper will focus
on answering the empirical question of why nominees to the federal Courts of Appeals have been
subjected to holds on the floor of the Senate which have delayed or prevented their confirmation.
The main thrust of this analysis is to determine the reasons and motivations for the numerous
holds that have affected Circuit Court nominees between 1987 and 2002.
55
METHODOLOGY
In order to determine when and why holds have been used against nominees to the
Circuit Courts of Appeals between 1987 and 2002, I conducted a search for all newspaper reports
in Lexis-Nexis For Law Schools’ “Newspaper Stories, Combined Papers” file and Westlaw’s
“All News” file which spoke of a hold being placed against a judicial nominee. Searches were
done both for mentions of “holds” and/or “blocks” in general in relation to judicial confirmations
and for mentions of holds in relation to specific nominees (thus, a search was done for any
articles mentioning each nominee and these articles were then searched to see if they mentioned
a hold being placed against the nominee).
56
A final set of searches was done for all reported
54
Statement of the Chairman, June 17, 2003. Can be found at <rules.senate.gov/hearings/2003>.
55
Many of these same holds also applied to District Court nominees as well as other executive branch nominees.
However, this paper’s focus is on Circuit Court nominees and so will discuss how these holds affected these
nominees exclusively. This focus also means that holds which affected only District Court nominees or executive
branch nominees are excluded from the analysis herein. Future projects will apply this methodology to holds which
affect District Court nominees.
56
Both terms were used as holds are many times referred to as “blocks” by the media.
Convention