The plea, in the chief justice’s annual year-end report on the federal judiciary, was an echo of one from his predecessor, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who made front-page news on New Year’s Day in 1998 by criticizing the Senate for failing to move more quickly on President Bill Clinton’s judicial nominees.
Both chief justices were appointed by Republican presidents, and both said that their interest was not in particular appointees but in a judiciary functioning at something like full strength.
“We do not comment on the merits of individual nominees,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote on Friday. “That is as it should be. The judiciary must respect the constitutional prerogatives of the president and Congress in the same way that the judiciary expects respect for its constitutional role.”
But he identified what he called a systemic problem.
“Each political party has found it easy to turn on a dime from decrying to defending the blocking of judicial nominations, depending on their changing political fortunes,” he said.
The upshot, he said, was “acute difficulties for some judicial districts.”
The chief justice noted that the Senate recently filled a number of vacancies. Including 19 recently confirmed judges, the Senate has confirmed 62 of Mr. Obama’s nominees. There are 96 federal court vacancies, according to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.
“There remains,” the chief justice wrote, “an urgent need for the political branches to find a long-term solution to this recurring problem.”
The chief justice’s report, which was 12 pages long and included four pages of statistics, was largely focused on the judicial branch’s efforts to save money in difficult economic times. It did not explicitly press for an increase in judicial pay, a topic that has been a major theme in earlier reports.
The report opened with a sketch of the financial and cultural climate in 1935, during the Great Depression. “Many Americans sought respite from the nation’s economic troubles at their local movie theaters, which debuted now-classic films, such as ‘Mutiny on the Bounty,’ ‘Top Hat’ and ‘Night at the Opera,’ ” Chief Justice Roberts wrote.
“Moviegoers of that era enjoyed a prelude of short features as they settled into their seats,” he continued. “As the lights dimmed, the screen beamed previews of coming attractions, Merrie Melody cartoons, and the Movietone newsreels of current events.”
Those current events included, though the chief justice did not say so, a clash between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Supreme Court over New Deal legislation that may foreshadow a similar conflict when lawsuits over the recent health care legislation reach the court.
Chief Justice Roberts did describe newsreels showing the new Supreme Court building, which opened that year. “Seventy-five years later, the Supreme Court’s majestic building stands out as a familiar and iconic monument to the rule of law,” he wrote.
But he said nothing about the court’s decision this year to close its front doors to people seeking to enter, for reasons of security.
That decision, in May, was criticized by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said they hoped the day would come when it would be possible “to restore the Supreme Court’s main entrance as a symbol of dignified openness and meaningful access to equal justice under law.”