WASHINGTON (CN) — The Senate Judiciary Committee approved eight of President Donald Trump's judicial nominees on Thursday, setting up confirmation votes before the full Senate.
The votes are the first the committee has held since the Senate returned to Washington last week after a lengthy recess due to the coronavirus pandemic. Senators and staffers arrived to the meeting wearing masks and the proceedings were held in a room much larger than the Judiciary Committee's regular space.
Some senators sat behind a permanent wooden dais, while others sat at temporary tables arranged in a horseshoe in the middle of the room to maintain social distancing.
Most of the nominees voted out of the committee on Thursday are up for seats on lower-profile courts that generally do not spark the most contentious nomination fights in the Senate, but several drew opposition from Democrats and went through on party-line votes.
Stephen Schwartz is nominated to the Court of Federal Claims, a specialty court that hears lawsuits raising monetary claims against the federal government. Many of its cases involve disputes over the federal government's award of contracts, and it also hears tax refund and property cases.
The court has a low public profile, but Democrats have opposed Schwartz for cases he took on as an attorney, particularly two related to voting and transgender rights.
While a partner at the firm Schaerr Duncan, Schwartz helped draft a brief at the Supreme Court on behalf of a school board opposing a transgender teenager who sought to use the boys' bathroom at his school. Schwartz also defended a North Carolina voter identification law before the Supreme Court after the Fourth Circuit found it targeted "African Americans with almost surgical precision."
Defending his legal experience, Schwartz told the committee he has backed a "diversity of interests," from high-profile constitutional cases to a dispute over the federal regulation of raisins to less political commercial litigation.
"Generally speaking, I believe that my legal career has been marked not by efforts to court political controversy, but by consistent contact with complex and unsettled legal issues across a wide range of constitutional and statutory fields," Schwartz wrote in response to questions submitted after his nomination hearing. "I believe that my own work has been characterized not only by integrity and careful legal reasoning, but by objectivity and fairness."
Schwartz, who was first nominated to the seat in 2017, also faced opposition from Democrats over articles he wrote while an undergraduate student at Yale that argued for the elimination of Social Security and some federal agencies.
"His views on the social safety net were problematic when he first expressed them, but they're even more problematic now in the midst of a global pandemic that has already taken the lives of more than 80,000 Americans," Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the committee, said at the meeting Thursday.
After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School, Schwartz clerked for U.S. Circuit Judge Jerry Smith on the Fifth Circuit. He then went on to be an associate at the Washington, D.C., firm Kirkland & Ellis before joining the right-leaning Cause of Action Institute in 2015.
Schwartz cleared the committee with a 12-10 vote that fell along party lines.
Joining Schwartz on the Court of Federal Claims after passing through the committee on a party-line vote will be Kathryn Davis. Davis has been an attorney with the federal programs branch of the Justice Department's Civil Division since 2008 and is also a lecturer at George Washington University Law School.
Davis has never practiced before the Court of Federal Claims, but told the committee her time with the Justice Department has given her "firsthand experience" with many of the unique legal issues that arise during litigation involving the federal government.