WASHINGTON—The Senate is poised to vote on one of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees — for a court in Tennessee.
Amid the election-year fight over filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court, the Senate is moving ahead on the nomination of Waverly Crenshaw to be U.S. district judge for the Middle District of Tennessee, a position that has been vacant since December 2014. The court has declared a “judicial emergency” because of the number of pending cases there.
The vote is scheduled for Monday evening.
Crenshaw has the support of Tennessee’s Republican senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, who have been pushing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to schedule a vote as Republicans and Democrats have clashed over whether Obama or his successor should fill the Supreme Court opening.
Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland last month to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, but Republicans have insisted on no hearings and no vote until the next president. The last time the Senate voted on a judicial nomination was Feb. 11, just two days before Scalia’s death.
Crenshaw’s expected confirmation may be among the last in Obama’s presidency. In recent decades, the Senate has slowed — and gradually stopped — its approval of judges nominated by a president of the opposing party in the later months of a president’s final year in office.
Twenty-seven of Obama’s nominees to district courts and five to the appeals court remain in limbo.
