What about Neil Katyal for D.C. Circuit?

June 11th, 2012

Today we saw President Obama renominate Caitlin Halligan and Sri Srinivasan for the D.C. Circuit.

What about Katyal? Just wondering. Especially in light of the fact that Verrilli, not Katyal was nominated for SG.

He must feel shafted. Especially after he was de facto SG during Kagan’s SCOTUS-warmup lap.

Update: Charlie Savage updated his post with an interesting nugget:

Update:Later on Monday, the White House acknowledged that it had not yet received a rating on Mr. Srinivasan from the American Bar Association’s judicial vetting committee but Mr. Obama had decided to nominate him anyway. Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman, declined to say why the administration had broken with its usual practice of waiting for such a rating before submitting a name to the Senate, but said the White House was “confident that he will be rated well-qualified.”

The Obama administration has had a somewhat tense relationship with the A.B.A. vetting committee, which – as the Times reported last year – has secretly given poor marks to a higher percentage of Mr. Obama’s potential candidates for judgeships than it did under the Clinton or the Bush administrations. Mr. Obama has not nominated anyone the bar group rated not qualified, so their identities and ratings are not public.

He must’ve really liked liked Sri.

Update 2: And this from Ed Whelan:

4. In late October 2011, I broke the news that the White House was planning to nominate NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer Debo P. Adegbile to the D.C. Circuit. Days later, an American Constitution Society blog and a Washington Post blogreported that Obama had asked the American Bar Association’s judicial-evaluations committee to conduct its pre-nomination assessment of Adegbile for that seat.

What ever happened to the anticipated Adegbile nomination? It’s now quite clear that Adegbile joined the “significant number of President Obama’s potential judicial nominees” who failed to pass the ABA committee’s screening.