Article II Section II of the Constitution gives the President the power to appoint federal judges “by and with the Advice and Counsel of the Senate.” The Senate plays an important role in determining the members of the federal judiciary. As a tool to encourage Senators to confirm Constitutional judges to federal courts, the Judicial Action Group created the Judicial Senate Scorecard. JAG designed the scorecard, so that individual voters can hold their Senator accountable. JAG encourages you to contact your local Senator through the Congressional switchboard. 

(202) 224-3121

In order to more accurately determine whether a judge should be confirmed, the Judicial Action Group is using the metrics developed by the American Family Action’s Center for Judicial Renewal. The Center has spent many hours researching each and every federal judicial nominee and publishes the result of their research. Judges are graded based on the 10 Principles of a Constitutional Judge. More details on this metric can be found at this link: https://afaaction.net/cjr/10-principles-of-a-constitutional-judge/. JAG also features research summaries on pending and confirmed nominees in the Research Summaries section of this site.

On the scorecard, a perfect score of 100 shows that every vote made by the Senator aligned with Center for Judicial Renewal’s recommendation. JAG encourages Yes votes on Grey rated judges but those are given less weight in the score than Green judges. Accordingly, a score of 0 indicates that a senator voted against the AFA recommendations every single time the Senator voted.  A more detailed description of the scoring methodology can be found below.