According to the National Law Journal, civil rights organisation Muslim Advocates says Qureshi is also the first Muslim a president has ever nominated to the federal judiciary. Earlier this year, the Guardian noted Obama had not yet nominated a Muslim to the federal bench, despite leading an unprecedented push to diversify the pool of “785 federal judges, according to the Federal Judicial Center, with about 90 vacancies outstanding.”“I am pleased to nominate Mr Qureshi to serve on the United States District Court bench,” Obama said in a statement. Merrick Garland, who Obama nominated to fill late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat back in March, is still waiting for Senate consideration. Dozens of other federal seats are likely to go unfilled through the remaining months of the president’s term, due largely to a long-running campaign of obstruction against Obama nominees. Last year, the Huffington Post reported a shortage of federal judges had resulted in massive backlogs of cases for judges across the country, with many individual judges working overtime to address them.

Source: Dhaka Tribune September 07, 2016 02:15 UTC