WASHINGTON (CN) — Just a week after the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Republican threatened to torpedo regular business over Democrats’ Supreme Court ethics inquiry, members of the upper chamber’s legal affairs panel met in the middle Wednesday to consider a group of district court nominees.
The Judiciary Committee was a battleground last week as Republicans raged against a Democrat-led effort to issue subpoenas for a pair of influential conservatives, who they contend had improper financial relationships with Supreme Court justices. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, the panel’s ranking member, has suggested that GOP lawmakers would gum up the panel in retaliation for Democrats’ effort.
Despite that, things were somewhat subdued on the Judiciary Committee Wednesday, as lawmakers questioned a trio of White House federal court nominees.
Among those were Sara Hill and John Russell, two appointments for vacancies on the Northern District of Oklahoma. Both nominees had the written support of the Sooner State’s all-Republican Senate delegation.
Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, introducing the nominees, thanked the Biden administration for reaching across the aisle to find consensus candidates.
“Oklahoma and the White House don’t agree on a lot of things,” he said, “but we can find common ground and we are able to work on things together. We have gone through a rigorous process over the course of the last year to have two incredibly well-qualified candidates.”
Lankford said that both of the Oklahoma nominees would “faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon them as a judge of the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
Hill, a member of the Cherokee Nation and the tribe’s former attorney general, would also be the first Indigenous woman to serve on the federal bench in Oklahoma, Lankford added.
Chair Dick Durbin, meanwhile, thanked Lankford and fellow Oklahoma Republican Markwayne Mullin for their cooperation and extended his gratitude for other committee Republicans doing similar work.
“We’re seeing some progress in many states,” the Illinois Democrat said, “and it’s encouraging.”
Durbin has long been a proponent of the age-old Senate tradition of blue slipping, which allows lawmakers to support or object to judicial nominees in their states. While the Judiciary Committee chair has held up blue slips as a vestige of bipartisanship in a divided Congress, critics say that the process gives senators an avenue to unfairly obstruct the White House’s judicial agenda.
While it was mostly smooth sailing Wednesday for the trio of nominees, some lawmakers had questions about Hill’s time as the Cherokee Nation’s secretary of natural resources, a position she held from 2015 to 2019.
Graham needled the nominee about her participation in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline — in 2016, Hill was a member of the Cherokee Nation’s delegation to the Standing Rock Reservation, where the controversial oil line was rerouted.
Asked whether her work related to the Dakota pipeline biased her against fossil fuels, Hill argued that her record includes work with fossil fuel companies.
“When they’re putting in infrastructure, things like pipelines, one of the things they have to deal with is making sure they don’t affect various sites where there might be tribal interest,” she told Graham. “Working directly with those pipeline companies to make sure that they’re in compliance with the law is something that I’ve done.”
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley pressed Hill about reports that Cherokee Federal, an independent contracting company made up of Cherokee Nation businesses, had negotiated a contract with the federal government to operate an intake facility for migrant youth.
Hill argued that she had not been involved in any of those discussions in her capacity as the Nation’s attorney general, pointing out that Cherokee Federal operates independently of the tribal government and that the facility in question wasn’t located within the Nation’s jurisdiction.
The nominee said that her office had not received any complaints related to Cherokee Federal or any other tribal entity managing migrant facilities. “I do recall there being a bit of a controversy about it,” she said, “but it was not as if I had a formal request for review or anything like that on my desk.”
Lawmakers also questioned Ramona Manglona, renominated by the White House to serve as a judge for the District Court of the Northern Mariana Islands. Manglona detailed her experience managing the federal courthouse serving the Pacific Island chain, including the court’s response to a severe typhoon the islands weathered in 2015.
“I believe all this experience is going to ensure that, should there be another disaster or calamity, I would be somewhat prepared to keep the courthouse doors open to ensure that people’s constitutional rights are still addressed,” she said.
Lawmakers were curious about Manglona’s island-hopping casework, which she explained sometimes requires her to fly from the Northern Mariana island of Saipan to the nearby U.S. territory of Guam. At one point, she was flying three to five times a day, she said.
Graham was particularly taken aback when Manglona noted that it took her 24 hours to fly to Washington from Saipan. “Is there anything the committee can do,” the lawmaker said, “to make your job easier?”
“Confirm me,” Manglona replied.
The Senate, tasked with approving the Biden administration’s federal court nominees, is slowly working its way through a backlog of appointments on the chamber floor. Lawmakers last week confirmed the White House’s 150th nominee, marking a major milestone that could put the administration on track to surpass the more than 200 federal judges approved under the Trump administration.
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