The Senate needs to confirm the vets court nominees now

The nation’s newest federal court is also its busiest, yet it seldom receives any media attention praising it for its productivity.   

The U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims (CAVC), once described by the Washington Post as the little-known appeals court “sandwiched between a deli and a daycare,” due to its lack of a standalone courthouse, continues to chip away at a growing backlog of appeals filed by military veterans and their survivors, despite the fact that its work is often drowned out in press coverage by complaints about the decisions of the administrative agency it reviews, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

{mosads}As a result, the CAVC’s annual performance report is seldom read by anyone outside of the court’s staff or those who practice before it.

However, this year, the CAVC’s Fiscal Year 2016 annual report contained an important closing paragraph:

Of note, in its Fiscal Year 2017 report, the Board of Veterans’ Appeals has projected a significant and inevitable increase it its workload.  At the same time, the Court is quickly losing judges to retirement. . . . In order for the Court to keep pace with its considerable caseload and projected workload increase, the Court has the immediate need for swift action by the President and Congress to fill the vacant judgeships.

Those who practice before the CAVC or have an appeal pending there had reasons to be skeptical. The last time that there were at least this many vacancies at the CAVC, during the Obama administration, advocates’ pleas for help fell on deaf ears.

At the time, in mid-2011, the Obama administration continued to pay lip service to the priority of veterans issues, yet the three vacancies at the CAVC remained unfilled for several years. Advocates who wrote to the White House directly about the problem stated that they failed to receive a response.

Currently, the Court once again has multiple vacancies — four to be precise, which is quite a sizable percentage given that the Court, as a whole, is only authorized nine judges.

However, this time around, there is reason for cautious optimism.

What is different this time around is the priority placed on veterans issues by the Trump administration and the momentum veterans issues currently have in Congress due to the fact that they are, quite literally, the only bipartisan issue Congress and the administration can agree on.

Indeed, with the recent collapse of Trump’s Obamacare repeal and replace initiative, Congress and the Trump administration are in need of a win, and veterans issues continue to appear to be the only place they may be able to obtain one.

With regard to the CAVC specifically, when it was brought to the Trump Administration’s attention that the CAVC was in dire need of more judges, three of four nominees were announced almost immediately.

Like Obama, Trump also campaigned on making veterans issues a priority. But, unlike Obama, within his first six months in office, Trump implemented his promise to reform the VA by signing the bipartisan VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2017.

Moreover, despite the usual lengthy delays that accompany judicial appointments, the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs has a hearing scheduled this week to review the nominees for three of the four CAVC judgeships.

There is also a unique opportunity for the Senate to act quickly on the confirmation of these pending nominations. Recently, the New York Times upheld both the House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committees as an example of “Washington working as designed” with “magnanimous hearings[,] bipartisan votes[, and] substantial legislation on its way to becoming law.”

However, like the CAVC itself, the article went on to note that “few have taken notice.”

That needs to change.

In a political era where good news is hard to come by, it is difficult to find anyone, Republican or Democrat, who is opposed to improving the lives of our nation’s veterans, which includes the receipt of more accurate and timely appeals decisions by the CAVC. Having a full staff of judges ready to issue those decisions will thus go a long way toward further improving the veterans appeals process.

Veterans advocates echo similar sentiments. According to Diane Boyd Rauber, Executive Director of the National Organization of Veterans Advocates (NOVA), “filling the court is very important for our nation’s veterans, and we are glad to see the administration made it a priority with well-qualified candidates. We hope they can be confirmed quickly.”

Similarly, Glenn Bergmann, partner at the law firm Bergmann & Moore that practices before the CAVC, stated “the CAVC plays a critical role in the VA disability benefit claim appeal process, and veterans and counsel appreciate how Senators are moving forward with the confirmation process.” 

Moreover, the three nominees to the CAVC, Michael P. Allen, Amanda L. Meredith, and Joseph L. Toth, are less controversial than Trump’s nominees to generalist Article III courts, as is usually the case with the CAVC.

Accordingly, the Senate should start to take notice, and confirm the three nominees to the CAVC as soon as possible after Wednesday’s hearing.

Rory E. Riley-Topping has dedicated her career to ensuring accountability within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to care for our nation’s veterans. She is the principal at Riley-Topping Consulting and has served in a legal capacity for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, the National Veterans Legal Services Program, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and can be reached on Twitter @RileyTopping.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.