A little more than two weeks after the chief judge of the Central District of California called her bench's shortage of jurists "a crisis of unprecedented magnitude," the Senate Judiciary Committee moved forward with hearings on two of the president's Central District nominees. 

Chief U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips of the Central District of California wrote an Oct. 29 letter to Sens. Lindsey Graham, Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, urging them to take steps to fill the open seats in her district. Phillips noted average caseloads in the district have ballooned to twice the national average as more than a third of the district's 28 active judgeships sit unfilled.

The Senate Judiciary on Wednesday held confirmation hearings for two of Trump's picks for the Central District bench—current Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Stanley Blumenfeld and Mark Scarsi, the managing partner of Milbank's Los Angeles office—alongside two other nominees to the federal bench. Feinstein, the ranking minority member on the committee and the only Senate Democrat present during the hearing, made remarks introducing both nominees and indicated that she and Harris had returned blue slips on the nominations.

"This signifies both home-state senators have no problem with the nominations at this stage," Feinstein said. 

The nominees, for their part, thanked both senators and their vetting committees for considering their nominations, and faced largely friendly questions from Republican senators.  

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, who served as acting committee chair in Graham's absence Wednesday, said the White House had been working with the California senators "for months" on a slate of 13 nominees to the district courts across California. "I'm hopeful this will be the first of several hearings for California nominees," she said.

Blackburn referenced Phillips' letter Wednesday before questioning the two California nominees about what steps they would take to "move this process forward and clear this backlog" of cases in the Central District.

Blumenfeld, who has overseen more than 200 trials since taking the superior court bench in 2006, noted that California state court judges have a statutory mandate to get all cases decided within 90 days of submission. He said if confirmed to the district court bench, he would "attempt to impose a similar deadline" even though it's not required by law in the federal system.

"I would allow deadlines to drive and to make sure we're all pushing towards that end," Blumenfeld said.

Scarsi, who had stints at O'Melveny & Myers and Christie, Parker & Hale prior to joining Milbank in 2007, said the judges he'd seen keep things on track keep the parties on "strict deadlines."

"They don't allow the lawyers to delay things on one side or the other," Scarsi said. Scarsi also said that he would make as much use of magistrate judges as he could to try to handle things such as discovery that might slow down a particular case's schedule. 

Feinstein didn't address any questions to the Central District nominees and instead directed her questions to another of the four Trump nominees being considered at Wednesday's hearing, Stephen A. Vaden, a nominee for the U.S. Court of International Trade who is currently the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

The panel also included Grace Karaffa Obermann, an administrative patent judge nominated for a seat on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

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