Partisan opposition to candidates for federal judgeships may cease as more attention is brought to the issue, former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon predicts.

There has been increasing pressure from editorial writers in newspapers regarding the hold up of the vote on federal judge nominees, Simon said. I think as the abuse becomes more visible, the Senate is likely to back off on the partisanship.

In March 1995, SIU law professor Wenona Whitfield was nominated to an open seat for a federal judgeship in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois by then Sen. Simon.

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Whitfield’s nomination went through the entire process, passing the FBI and American Bar Association checks. The nomination made it to the Senate, where it was held up in the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee without a vote, until the nomination expired when the U.S. Senate session recessed in September 1996.

The panel will accept applications through Oct. 17, at which point it will review the applications and choose three finalists. The panel will forward the names of the three finalists to Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, D-Ill., and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who will make their recommendations to President Bill Clinton.

Michael Briggs, press secretary for Braun, said there is a backlog of cases in Southern Illinois as a result of the unfilled judge seats. There are three districts in Illinois:Northern, Central and Southern.

There are 22 seats in the Northern District with two vacancies. There are four seats in the Central District with one vacancy, and two of the four seats in the Southern District remain vacant.

The Republicans are throwing up roadblock after roadblock in an attempt to keep judges nominated by Clinton from sitting on the bench so that those judges nominated by Ronald Reagan and George Bush remain in control, Briggs said.

Chief counsel for Durbin’s legal committee, Victoria Bassetti, said the belief in Durbin’s office was that the Republicans were being as difficult this year as they were in 1995 and 1996.

Briggs said Whitfield could have resubmitted her name for consideration again this year, but she did not.

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Whitfield would not comment about the federal judge nominations and referred all questions to Braun and Durbin.

I think she would have made a terrific judge, Simon said. At a hearing of the five nominees in Washington, D.C., she was clearly the best of the five.

Simon said Whitfield would have been the first woman and the first African-American to serve in the Southern Illinois District of the U.S. District Court.

Wenona was a sharp lawyer, and she had taught law, Simon said. She was thought of highly by her students and had a lot of experience in the court system.

Whitfield has been an associate professor at SIU since 1992 and dean since 1995. She won the Fulbright Award in 1991 as a visiting professor with the University of Ghana’s law faculty. Whitfield was in a private practice with a black law firm in Chicago, first as an associate and then as a partner, before she came to SIU to teach. She received her law degree from SIU and a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Illinois Wesleyan University.

Applications for federal judgeships are being reviewed by a nine-member panel made up of various members of the legal community. The committee is headed by J. William Lucco, a lawyer in Edwardsville.

Applicants submit their names to the panel for review. The names of three finalists are submitted to the senior senator from the party of the president, who submits the applicants to the president for nomination. The White House reviews the nominees and runs checks through the FBI and the American Bar Association. If the nominees clear the checks, the president then submits this list of applicants to the Senate, where the applicants will be voted on.

The real losers in this are not the Democrats or the Republicans, Briggs said, they are the American people who deserve an adequate judicial system.