GOP rushes to confirm judges
Senate truce collapses over recess hearings
WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats struck a deal last week with Republicans that saw the quick confirmation of 15 more conservative judges in exchange for a rapid flight to the campaign trail.
Liberal activists were infuriated, but after the brutally divisive fight to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the agreement held out a promise of peace.
“I would like to have the future mending things,” declared the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
On Wednesday, at Grassley’s instruction, the armistice collapsed.
Republicans on the Judiciary Committee convened yet another hearing to consider still more conservative federal court nominees — while the Senate was technically in recess.
Incensed Democrats boycotted the proceedings, but their empty chairs did not prevent candidates for the bench, such as Allison Rushing, 36, a social conservative nominated by President Donald Trump to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, from taking a crucial step toward confirmation.
“If there was ever any hope that after the Kavanaugh experience we could return to bipartisanship on the Senate Judiciary Committee, it was shaken this morning,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the chamber.
Only a handful of Republicans attended the Wednesday hearing.
Rushing is drawing protests from liberal advocacy groups who say her résumé is too thin for an appeals court nominee.
She clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and Judge Neil Gorsuch, before Gorsuch became a Supreme Court justice, but is only 11 years out of law school and has never been a judge.
If confirmed, she would become the youngest nominee to take the federal bench in more than 15 years.
For their part, Democrats are facing some serious blowback from progressives, who were already up in arms over last week’s deal.
Brian Fallon, the executive director of Demand Justice, a liberal advocacy group, said Democrats should have demanded that Wednesday’s hearing, and another one scheduled for next week, be delayed as part of the recess deal.
“To me, it’s a sign that they didn’t just get stuffed in a locker here; they had their lunch money taken,” Fallon said.
In the minority, Democrats have no power to determine when hearings are held.
With Grassley absent, Sen John Kennedy of Lousiana acted as the chairman for Wednesday’s hearing.
Five district court nominees — Thomas P. Barber, Wendy Williams Berger, Rodney Smith and T. Kent Wetherell II, all state judges in Florida, and Corey Landon Maze, a special deputy attorney general for Alabama — also came before the committee on Wednesday, facing questions about issues including the First Amendment and racial preferences in college admissions.