That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post, which looks at a Fourth Circuit seat that remained unfilled for sixteen years, from 1994 to 2010. Federal district judge Terrence Boyle was the stalled nominee for six of those years. Senator Jesse Helms’s strong support for his nomination in 2001 didn’t help much after Helms retired at the end of 2002.

An excerpt:

Boyle finally had his confirmation hearing in 2005, after Republican Richard Burr won the Senate seat in North Carolina that [John] Edwards had vacated. But by this point Boyle had all the stigma of being a Helms protégé and none of the benefit. “Jesse Helms should not be awarded a living legacy on [the Fourth Circuit],” the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights declared in its opposition to Boyle’s nomination. Boyle’s critics attacked him on his supposed hostility to civil rights, and that attack mobilized Democrats against him and deterred [Elizabeth] Dole and Burr from fighting on his behalf. So even though the committee favorably reported Boyle’s nomination to the Senate floor in June 2005, the Senate took no action on his nomination through 2006.

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