The Sunday New York Times has a powerful editorial about the intentional damage being done to our nation by Senate Republicans' sabotage of the judiciary branch of the United States government.

The number of vacancies on the nation's federal courts has reached an astonishingly high level, creating a serious shortage of judges and undermining the ability of the nation's court system to bestow justice. ...

By far the most important cause of this unfortunate state of affairs is the determination of Senate Republicans, for reasons of politics, ideology and spite, to confirm as few of President Obama's judicial choices as possible.

The editorial showed graphically just how ridiculously long Obama's nominees are forced to wait after committee approval before Republicans will stop blocking Majority Leader Reid from scheduling a simple yes-or-no vote.

We saw a high-profile example of groundless obstruction last month with the Republicans' second filibuster of Caitlin Halligan to the DC Circuit, the nation's second most important court. PFAW has published a report analyzing why this court is so important and why the GOP is set on preventing the president from restoring balance to what has become a notoriously arch-conservative court. Of the 11 active judgeships on this influential court, four remain vacant. This is despite the fact that President Obama nominated Halligan in 2010. He also nominated Sri Srinivasan, yet due to Republican obstruction at the committee level, hearings for Srinivasan have been delayed until this week, a full ten months after his nomination.

The Times concludes:

The Halligan filibuster got some Democratic senators talking about a bolder strategy, including revisiting filibuster reform and making it harder for senators to torpedo or delay nominations to judicial vacancies in their home states. Another proposal is to have Mr. Obama make simultaneous nominations to fill the four vacancies on the District of Columbia Circuit, which would force Republicans to come up with plausible reasons to oppose each of them. In the face of political paralysis, these ideas are worth embracing. (emphasis added)

President Obama should nominate strong candidates with diverse backgrounds and impeccable qualifications for each of the vacancies, to restore the DC Circuit to the number of judges that Congress has determined it needs to operate effectively. We know the Republicans will manufacture reasons to obstruct them, but allowing even one vacancy to go without a nominee hands a partisan victory to a far-right political party that is willing to sacrifice Americans' access to justice to their own narrow political agenda.

Yesterday, Senate Republicans finally stopped blocking a confirmation vote for Federal Circuit Court nominee Richard Taranto. It was March 29 of last year that he was first cleared by the Judiciary Committee, but Republicans refused to allow a fair yes-or-no vote. This year, President Obama renominated him and he was finally confirmed … unanimously.

Yes, Senate Republicans spent nearly a year blocking a nominee who they supported. This comes a week after the party again filibustered the highly qualified Caitlin Halligan for the critically important and understaffed DC Circuit court, offering clearly trumped up rationales that stark contradiction to their own statements when George W. Bush was the one populating the courts. Caitlin Halligan was nominated way back in 2010.

So it's no wonder that President Obama is raising the issue of this abusive treatment of his nominees with members of the Senate. Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked what the president plans to discuss during his visits with Senate Democrats and Republicans this week. Carney laid out the priority issues, including:

the need to do something about the pace of nominations being confirmed and considered in the Senate -- judicial nominations, in particular ...

...

[The president] will also, I'm sure, talk about the need to do something about the problems that we've been seeing in the Senate with Republicans when it comes to confirming the President's judicial nominations.

When it takes nearly a year to confirm an unopposed circuit nominee like Richard Taranto, and when an undoubtedly qualified nominee like Caitlin Halligan isn't even allowed a vote, there is something seriously wrong. And it isn't just the victimized nominees who suffer: It's the American people who suffer when courts are blocked from operating at peak efficiency and when those who would otherwise make excellent judges are dissuaded from putting themselves up for nomination by a destructive and needlessly drawn-out confirmation process.

The Senate Republican Policy Committee has released the party's official talking points to justify their leadership's decision to filibuster Caitlin Halligan's nomination to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

You know you're in store for a treat when the very first sentence is blatantly false:

Last Congress, the Senate expressed its will and rejected the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

In fact, exactly the opposite happened: The Senate was prevented from "expressing its will" by a minority of senators who filibustered Halligan's nomination. A majority of senators – 54 – voted to end the filibuster, but a minority of 45 senators, all Republicans, voted to prevent the Senate from being able to cast a yes-or-no vote on the nomination. In other words, the Senate was gagged and not allowed to "express its will." Had it been allowed to vote, Halligan would have been on the bench for more than a year now.

Things don't get much better with the second paragraph, which approvingly cites Gun Owners of America's criticism of a legal argument Halligan once made as an advocate for her client, the State of New York:

Gun Owners of America described this as a strategy to "eliminate the manufacture of firearms in America."

GOA is hardly an organization that a major political party should be citing with approval. As Right Wing Watch has reported:

But the GOA's extreme language [about Halligan] should come as no surprise. After all, this is the same group that speculated that the Aurora movie theater shooting was an inside job, said that armed citizens could have stopped the Holocaust, claimed that the Affordable Care Act would "take away your guns," and warned President Obama that he should "remember King George III's experience." Recently, GOA president Larry Pratt has gone even further, agreeing with theories that President Obama is raising a black army to massacre white Americans and that the president intends to pit "Christian, heterosexual white haves" against "black Muslim and/or atheist…have-nots."

This is the group that Senate Republicans want to listen to on staffing America's courts?

With two opening paragraphs like these talking points have, you know you need to take the rest of the document with more than a grain of salt.

Two weeks ago, on January 25th, 2013, a panel of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, consisting of three judges appointed by Republican presidents, unanimously invalidated a decision by the National Labor Relations Board. In Noel Canning v. N.L.R.B., the D.C. Circuit held that the Board did not have a sufficient number of members, or quorum, to make binding decisions because three of the five Board members were appointed through an improper use of the Constitution's Recess Appointments Clause. This decision calls into question many of the NLRB's actions since the three recess appointments were made last year.

Although the decision by the D.C. Circuit was specific to the NLRB, the rationale for the decision, if applied to other recess appointments, could result in chaos throughout the federal government. Several commentators have noted that decisions issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over the last year could also be subject to invalidation, since Director Richard Cordray was recess appointed at the same time as the NLRB appointees.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute lambasted the D.C. Circuit's ruling as "a remarkable exercise of judicial overreach and arrogance." Ornstein highlighted the difference between President Obama's use of recess appointments from that of his predecessors:

I am not a fan of excessive use of recess appointments, especially when they are made to avoid a major controversy or the simple inconvenience of a possible negative vote in the Senate. But those kinds of recess appointments were made more frequently in the Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush years . . . . Our current president has issued few recess appointments and did so only when faced with unprecedented filibusters against qualified and widely admired nominees who were opposed because Republicans wanted to emasculate their agencies in violation of common practice and the fiduciary duty of lawmakers to allow laws to be administered and implemented.

A report by the Congressional Research Service released earlier this week found that since January 1981, hundreds of recess appointments by Presidents Ronald Reagan (232), George H. W. Bush (78), Bill Clinton (139), George W. Bush (171), and Barack Obama (32) could have been deemed improper under Noel Canning's reasoning. In total, the report found that least 652 recess appointments were either made outside the narrow window the Court defined for making recess appointments or were made in a recess in which the vacancy did not occur—neither of which would be allowed under the judges' ruling.

In 2004, President George W. Bush made recess appointments of two controversial judges to federal circuit courts: Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit and William Pryor to the Eleventh Circuit. Since these recess appointments occurred long after the Senate session in which the vacancy occurred, at least two dozen judicial opinions authored by these judges could be vulnerable to invalidation were Noel Canning applied.

The NLRB can still request a rehearing en banc from the D.C. Circuit or, more likely, appeal to the Supreme Court. If that's the case, the Court is likely to consider the question, not only because of the implication for the separation of powers, but because the Eleventh Circuit interpreted the Recess Appointments Clause differently in a 2005 case. In addition, challenges to President Obama's recess NLRB appointments are still pending in other circuits. The NLRB's Chairman, Mark Gaston Pearce, has remarked that the Board will continue its work while the litigation continues. But until we have a final decision on the matter, a pall has been cast upon all recess appointments and the decisions made by such appointees.