Uniparty Strikes Again! Seven GOP Senators Join Dems in Confirming Biden Judicial Nominee
CORRECTION, June 6, 2024: Sen. Mike Rounds is from South Dakota. An earlier version of this article had a different state.
Okay, before you read below, can you guess which Republican senators voted with Democrats 57-41 on a judicial nomination all other Republicans rejected?
Some of it shouldn’t be hard. Because if you watch the votes of these people, you’ll see a familiar pattern.
Mitt Romney of Utah voting with the Democrats? Of course.
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska? Naturally.
Susan Collins of Maine? Yes.
Those three aren’t hard to guess.
And the ratings of this trio on the Heritage Action for America Scorecard would confirm your guesses — Romney 27 percent, Murkowski and Collins 13 percent.
But there were four other Republicans who joined Democrats and independent Bernie Sanders in confirming Tanya Monique Jones Bosier, nominated by President Joe Biden as an associate judge on the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
Any more guesses?
Lindsay Graham of South Carolina?
One never knows which way Sen. Graham’s vote might fall — he only favors Democrats on days ending with “y,” but on some of those days, he takes strong stands for conservative principles.
On Tuesday he voted with the Democrats.
Graham’s Heritage rating also reflects his attainment of great heights of mediocrity regarding conservativism – 52 percent.
Other Republicans joining Democrats included Mike Rounds of South Dakota (33 percent) and Thom Tillis of North Carolina (36 percent).
Then there’s James Lankford of Oklahoma. Usually a conservative party-line voter, the 56-year-old former Baptist youth camp president sometimes surprises, as he did this week in voting Biden’s judicial confirmation.
And his Heritage score — 48 percent — reflects his inconsistencies.
Perhaps there were things about Judge Tanya Jones Bosier that impressed these senators enough to vote to confirm her.
Serving at the time of her confirmation as a magistrate judge of the Superior Court of D.C., Jones Bosier had graduated at the top of her undergraduate class from Syracuse University and in her March opening statement to Senators spoke of her family as her highest treasure, including a son in the U.S. Army.
That gets the attention of conservatives and Republicans.
And in earlier years, there might have been bipartisan — enthusiastic by some, grudging by others — votes in favor of confirmation out of respect for the judge and the president.
But those days are gone. The nomination of Jones Bosier by a Democrat automatically makes her suspect, especially in these days of lawfare waged mainly by that side of the aisle.
Yeah, that’s bad, but that’s how it is.
And it’s not all that new. Democrat behavior in judicial confirmations resulted in the coining of the verb “bork” after what they did in abusing Constitutional originalist Robert Bork’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan.
So polarized and predictable is the judiciary that there are calls — including among some of us in Arkansas — to remove restrictions that elections of judges be nonpartisan.
Truth in packaging, I guess you might call it. Tell us who you are, so we can decide whether or not to vote for you.
Tellingly, Democrats voted unanimously for Jones Bosier.
To be sure, if Murkowski, Collins, Romney and the others had gone with their fellow Republicans and voted against her, Judge Jones Bosier still would have been confirmed.
Yet a vote of 50-48 would have sent a message of resistance to the increasingly reckless whims of the Democratic Party.
If elections have consequences, like it or not, so do party standards.
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