Justice & Law Quote by Joe Lockhart

"Dozens and dozens and dozens" isn’t just emphasis; it’s a deliberate drumbeat meant to make delay feel absurd. Joe Lockhart, speaking as a seasoned political communicator with a journalist’s ear for punchy cadence, is building a sense of bottlenecked urgency. The repetition performs impatience. It’s the verbal equivalent of pointing at a long line and asking why nobody’s opening another register.

The second half pivots from partisan procedural gripe to public-service alarm: "a court system that's crying out for more judges". That phrase is crafted to sound less like Washington scorekeeping and more like institutional distress. Courts don’t literally cry, of course; the point is to personify the judiciary as overwhelmed, almost pleading. It reframes nominations from abstract staffing to real-world consequence: delayed hearings, backlogged cases, justice slowed into dysfunction.

Lockhart’s specific intent is to put the onus on whoever is stalling confirmations (typically the Senate in this kind of fight) without naming them, a classic move when you want to mobilize broad frustration rather than trigger tribal defenses. The subtext is accountability: if the courts are failing, it’s because elected officials are treating judgeships like leverage.

Contextually, this kind of line lives in the recurring American cycle where judicial nominations become proxy warfare. It works because it collapses complexity into two images anyone can grasp: a pile of waiting nominees and a system in distress, implying the solution is obvious and the obstruction is willful.