Biden’s diverse judicial nominees move swiftly through Democratic Senate after spring frustrations

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Biden's diverse judicial nominees move swiftly through Democratic Senate after spring frustrations | CNN Politics

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As the start of summer brought several landmark Supreme Court rulings that jerked the law to the right, across the street, the Democratic-controlled Senate was confirming judicial nominees whose progressive legal backgrounds served as a foil to the direction the conservative justices were heading.

 

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Two weeks after the court handed down a ruling weakening federal protections for striking workers, the Senate put on a California federal court Casey Pitts, a labor lawyer who had helped fend off a legal challenge to a pro-union law in Seattle.

Natasha Merle, a civil rights attorney and former public defender who represented defendants bringing post-conviction challenges, was confirmed for Brooklyn's federal court the day before the high court made it harder for certain kinds of those challenges to be pursued.

And close to the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's ruling overturning a constitutional right to an abortion, the Senate approved for a Boston-based federal appeals court Julie Rikelman, the reproductive rights lawyer who argued before the justices in favor of preserving abortion rights.

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Now fast forward and we’re confirming people directly from the ACLU to the bench,” said Kang, who worked on judicial nominees in the Obama White House.

 

One such appointee is Dale Ho, a newly-confirmed judge on Manhattan’s federal court who previously led the ACLU Voting Rights Project. The other is Nusrat Choudhury, confirmed last month to the federal court in Brooklyn. Her ACLU resume includes major roles in its racial justice program and its national security project. Choudhury is also the first Muslim woman to be confirmed as a federal judge.

 

That nominees with such prominent civil rights backgrounds ended up on the federal bench was the fruition of a concerted effort to expand the pipeline of who is considered for judgeships.

 

 

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Some of you probably know about the blue slip crap:

 

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Biden has had some success in finding district court nominees for purple or red states that have the support of Republican home state senators, but often those appointees come from a more conventional legal background.

 

HOWEVER:

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And because Republicans under Trump abolished blue slips for circuit court nominees, the Senate Democrats have been able to move forward recently with two notable Biden nominees to appeals courts that lean right. One of them is Rachel Bloomekatz, a public interest attorney who has experience in environmental law, and who also represented students who challenged an Ohio voter registration restriction as well as the family of an unarmed teenage migrant who was fatally shot by a Border patrol agent. The Senate is scheduled to vote Tuesday on her confirmation to the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals, where Trump had a heavy influence.

 

The confirmation of Nancy Abdu to the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers the southeast and was drastically reshaped by Trump, made her the first Black woman confirmed to that appeals court. When Abudu, an alum of the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center who litigated key voting rights cases, secured Senate approval in mid-May, it was seen as the "tip of the spear" of the current wave, Zwarensteyn said.

 

 

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