The District of Columbia Circuit Court has one of the lowest, if not the lowest, caseloads of all the circuit courts in the country. An objective review of the court’s workload makes clear that the workload simply doesn’t justify adding judges to this court, particularly when additional judgeships cost approximately $1 million, per year, per judge.
Nearly every way you look at it, the caseloads on the D.C. Circuit have decreased markedly over the last several years. This decrease is evident in both the total number of appeals filed and the total number of appeals terminated.
Since 2006 the caseload for the D.C. Circuit has continued to decrease. In terms of raw numbers, the D.C. Circuit has the lowest number of total appeals filed annually among all the circuit courts of appeals. In 2005, that number was 1,379. Last year, it was 1,193, a decrease of 13.5 percent.
There are a lot of different ways to look at these numbers, but perhaps the best numbers to examine are those that measure the workload per active judge. The caseload of the D.C. Circuit has decreased so much since 2005, that even with two fewer active judges, the filing levels per active judge are practically the same. In 2005, with 10 active judges, the court had 138 appeals filed per active judge. Today, with only eight active judges, it has 149. This makes the D.C. Circuit caseload levels the lowest in the nation and less than half the national average.
So why is the President seeking to fill seats on this particular court, instead of courts where they are most needed? It’s pretty clear why the President is pushing this agenda so aggressively. Many of the President’s allies have made the rationale for the sudden push. Take for example a Washington Post article which stated, “Giving liberals a greater say on the D.C. Circuit is important for Obama as he looks for ways to circumvent the Republican-led House and a polarized Senate on a number of policy fronts through executive order and other administrative procedures.”
And, even a member of the Democrat leadership admitted on the Senate floor that the reason they needed to fill these seats was because, as he saw it, the D.C. Circuit was “wreaking havoc with the country.”
Regardless, there is no escaping the fact that these judges are not needed. But don’t take it from me. Take it from the judges themselves on the D.C. Circuit Court. In order to get a firsthand account, several months ago I invited the current judges on the court to provide a candid assessment of the caseload.
What they said shouldn’t surprise anyone who has looked at this issue closely. The judges themselves confirmed that the workload on the D.C. Circuit is exceptionally low, stating, “the Court does not need additional judges.” And, “If any more judges were added now, there wouldn’t be enough work to go around.”
Those are powerful statements from the judges themselves and should give us pause before we saddle the American people with the bill for unnecessary judges.