WASHINGTON (CN) - The Senate Judiciary Committee approved eight nominees to federal courts around the country on Thursday, including Justice Neil Gorsuch's replacement on the 10th Circuit.
The eight judicial nominees the Judiciary Committee approved on Thursday are the most the panel has sent to the full Senate in a single day since President Donald Trump took office. Four of the judges were controversial, receiving committee approval on 11-9 party-line votes.
Perhaps the most high-profile of these is Colorado Supreme Court Justice Allison Eid, whom Trump nominated in June to replace Gorsuch on the 10th Circuit. A member of the conservative Federalist Society, Eid was on Trump's short list of potential nominees to the vacant seat on the Supreme Court.
Eid's confirmation hearing bore some similarities to that of her predecessor on the 10th Circuit, as Democrats criticized her for her conservative record on the bench. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., specifically prodded Eid at her September nomination hearing over a dissent Eid wrote holding a hotel should not have faced a lawsuit brought by a group of women who got into a car accident after being kicked out of the building for being drunk and disorderly.
At her nomination hearing, Eid justified her opinion by pointing out the women walked past a line of taxis before deciding to drive home instead.
On Thursday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., also hit Eid for writing an opinion arguing juveniles already sentenced to life without parole could not receive retroactive relief after the Supreme Court's 2012 decisions in Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs, which held such sentences violated the Eighth Amendment. The Supreme Court later said in Montgomery v. Louisiana that the decision should apply retroactively.
"As Justice Gorsuch's replacement on the 10th Circuit, her record suggests she would echo his conservative approach to the law," Feinstein said at the hearing Thursday.
The committee also approved Stephanos Bibas, a professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School Trump nominated to serve on the Third Circuit. Also a member of the Federalist Society, the former federal prosecutor and clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy has worked as a professor since 2000.
His time in academia gave Democrats their greatest attack against his nomination, as Durbin brought up a paper Bibas wrote in 2009 but never published that advocated the use of "non-disfiguring corporal punishment" for certain types of crimes.
Bibas said in written responses to questions after his nomination hearing he decided to pull the paper after seeing it was "wrong and deeply offensive." He said he "workshopped" the paper during the summer of 2009 and took it to heart when a professor at Yale Law School told him about corporal punishment's role to Jim Crow and slavery.
"It is wrong and deeply offensive," Bibas wrote in a response to written questions to the committee after his nomination hearing. "As I told Senator Durbin, corporal punishment for crimes is wrong, it is cruel and it is un-American. It is degrading, inhumane and an affront to human dignity. I categorically, emphatically and unequivocally reject it."
But Durbin did not find Bibas' response satisfying, and read from the 60-page paper on Thursday before urging his colleagues to vote against the nomination.