The senator evidently was making a play on words about a jobs bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) had threatened to stall if Senate Republicans didn't stop blocking floor votes on the judicial nominees, 14 of whom were either unanimously endorsed by the Senate Judiciary Committee or had only one Republican Committee member vote against them.

Sen. McConnell is right to worry about jobs. But last week's fight over judicial nominees wasn't a fight over the 17 nominees themselves -- it was a fight for the rights and remedies of tens of millions of potential litigants residing in the judicial districts those nominees would serve. It was a fight with real meaning to people all over the country who have grievances with one another that must be resolved in federal court. What Senate obstructionists (of both parties) ignore in their preening speeches about "job creation" is that federal judges are perennial job creators -- to the extent they bring certainty and finality to legal disputes.

It's not complicated. When a federal judgeship goes vacant because of Senate intransigence, where judicial nominees with bipartisan approval are held up for no good reason, it's not typically the criminal cases which get unreasonably delayed. Criminal defendants have a speedy trial right under the Sixth Amendment. There is no such right for civil litigants. This means those litigants have to wait, often for years, for a trial judge to make available a time for the disposition of a dispute. The problem only gets worse, like it is now, when district courts are understaffed and judges are forced to handle more than their expected case load.

And who are civil litigants in our nation's federal courts? They are corporations and small business owners, investors and merchants, employees and employers, people just like you and me. Well, maybe not you and me since I didn't file a lawsuit this past year and you probably didn't either. But a lot of other people sure did. In 2010, according to federal court records, no fewer than 282,896 federal lawsuits were filed in America. In 2011, 289,252 lawsuits were filed, a 2.2 percent increase from the year before. The latest statistics reveal that there are currently 270,839 pending civil cases in our federal courts.

There's more alarming news. As Mike Scarcella reported last week in the National Law Journal, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts announced last week that there was "an 11 percent increase in intellectual property cases and a 15 percent increase in consumer credit filings" last year. The total number of pending cases in the federal system, including criminal cases, now is 367,600 and, guess what? Even as the number of federal laws (and federal crimes) increases, Congress plans to cut the budget for the federal judiciary come next January. Fewer judges. A smaller budget. Signposts on the road to third-world justice.