Preserving Existing Judgeships On the Superior Court of the District of Columbia

Floor Speech

Preserving Existing Judgeships On the Superior Court of the District of Columbia

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. NORTON. Again, thank you, Mr. Chairman, because your quick action on these matters affecting criminal and civil justice in the District of Columbia could not be more important to us. I appreciate the expertise of you and your staff in moving this bill forward.

Like the prior bill, Mr. Speaker, this is not a home-rule matter, because the courts involved are Federal courts, article 1 courts. Indeed, this matter started with the Senate of the United States which approves the judges of the D.C. Superior Court and confirms them as it confirms judges of other Federal courts. This bill again may be difficult to understand, but it is equally without additional cost to the Federal Government.

This House was vigilant to see to it that the District of Columbia now has a reformed family court as a part of the Superior Court system. And may I thank the prior then-majority leader, Mr. DeLay, who worked so closely with me on this bill and saw to it that the bill was funded, that there were additional judges, and that essentially a court which had not been revised for 30 years is now a state-of-the-art family court.

However, the Congress in its concern that children and families have adequate processing through this court mandated that there be at least 15 of these judges who would be family court committed judges only. The purpose was to keep or to repair the prior circumstance where these matters were distributed to the full 58 judges in the ordinary course of business. By segregating these matters out, these matters involving families and children, we sought to see to it that they were handled quickly and efficiently.

Congress never intended, however, to reduce the number of judges available to important criminal and civil matters, but in fact the cap has had that effect. So we have had an anomalous situation where the President of the United States, seeing a vacancy in the superior court unrelated to the family court, simply goes ahead and does what he is supposed to do; he nominates somebody to in fact fill that vacancy. But because of the cap which says you have got to have at least 15 of the judges to be family court judges, and with no increase in the number of judges, that person is sitting out there or standing out there, as you may, waiting for a vacancy to occur in the superior general part of the court as opposed to the family court.

What this bill does is to recognize what Congress intended in the first place, and that is to do no harm to either section. So, there would be a full cadre of family court judges, but certainly to do no harm to the processing of civil and criminal court judges. Therefore, to retain the kind of balance we had before, we would have to raise the number of judges available to the superior court; and that would mean, instead of 58 as the at-now raise reads, you would have 61.

Importantly, Mr. Speaker, you will note that there is no cost to the Federal Government. And both the chairman and I went to great lengths to make sure that we were not talking about increased appropriations. The court has assured us, and we have done our homework to assure ourselves, that the amount is already available in the appropriations that come to the Superior Court. All that is needed is for us to free up, if I may say so, the President of the United States so his nominees can in fact take their seats when in fact they are nominated.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source