This country has no more devoted a public servant than Judge Todd Edelman of the D.C. Superior Court. While other law graduates joined white-shoe firms, Edelman, a friend of mine since college, spent years as a public defender, as a labor union lawyer and, for the last 14 years, on the D.C. bench, where he is now presiding judge of the civil division.
Yet few have been so abused by the Senate’s broken judicial confirmation process as Edelman.
President Barack Obama nominated him in 2016 to fill a vacancy on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. But this was during then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s blockade of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, and Edelman, caught up like other nominees in the Republicans’ refusal to move Obama’s judicial picks, never got a vote, or even a hearing.
President Biden nominated Edelman to the same court in 2022. Republicans struck again, this time with an ugly, Willie-Horton style smear campaign. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) fabricated an outrageous lie, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that a man Edelman released in a pretrial hearing “went on to murder — to murder — an 11-year-old.” In reality, the man in question hadn’t murdered anyone, but Blackburn badly distorted the facts of a case to suggest that Edelman was to blame for a child’s death.