7 judges were voted out of the Senate judicial committee today. DiFi voted by proxy.

[onenote]

14. An overwhelming majority of Biden's nominees are confirmed with some republican support.

Last edited Thu Apr 20, 2023, 04:59 PM - Edit history (1)

It may come as a shock to some, but the vast majority of Biden's judicial nominees have been confirmed with at least some, often multiple, republican votes on the Senate floor. Specifically, out of 118 confirmed judges, only ten were confirmed only with the votes of Democratic senators.

In the committee, this also has usually been the case -- it is hardly unusual for one or more republicans to vote for advancing a Biden judicial nominee. As the votes above indicate, this is the case even when most, and often all, other republicans on the committee vote against the nominee. Here's another example -- on February 2, 2023, with Feinstein in attendance but Peter Welch absent, leaving the committee with an 10-10 split, 12 of Biden's nominees were advanced by the Judiciary Committee. Ten of the twelve were advanced by an 11-9 vote, meaning a single Republican voted to advance the nomination. Who was it? Lindsay Graham, of all people. Should we now treat all of those nominees as somehow suspect because they received one Republican vote?

With respect to those 118 confirmations, the Republicans who have supported Biden's nominees have most often been Romney, Graham, Collins and Murkowski. Why? It isn't because the judges they are confirming are ones they would choose if it was up to them, but because they are to a relative degree, still institutionalists who think a president should be given a certain amount of latitude in making appointments.

I certainly hope that DUers aren't about throw more than 100 Biden judicial nominees (and by extension, Biden) under the bus because they happened to get some republican votes.