WASHINGTON (CN) — The dissolution of a bipartisan border deal in the Senate this week may have caused headaches for lawmakers, but it proved a salve in the upper chamber’s Judiciary Committee on Thursday, where a group of White House judicial nominees enjoyed a low-tension confirmation hearing.
Committee Republicans were largely absent from the morning hearing, during which lawmakers heard testimony from Biden administration nominees for vacancies on federal district courts in Illinois, Michigan, Rhode Island, Virginia and D.C.
Panel chair Senator Dick Durbin chalked the meager GOP presence up to a caucus meeting that had run long — in which lawmakers were discussing a possible path forward after Senate Republicans scuttled a cross-aisle border security and foreign aid compromise bill Wednesday afternoon.
Other committee Republicans, including Utah Senator Mike Lee, skipped Thursday’s confirmation hearing to attend arguments at the Supreme Court, as justices weigh whether to keep former President Donald Trump off the ballot in some states.
The Judiciary Committee did, however, hear words of praise for the nominees from their Democrat home state senators.
Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, introducing District of Rhode Island appointee Melissa DuBose, said the current Rhode Island state court associate judge is “eminently qualified for the federal bench.”
Whitehouse cited overwhelming support from the Ocean State’s legal community for DuBose’s nomination, including a letter signed by all current members of the Rhode Island’s federal district in which the jurists wrote that her “integrity is beyond reproach, “that “her professional competence is varied and deep and her judicial temperament is exemplary.”
If confirmed, DuBose would be the first person of color and first openly LGBTQ person appointed to Rhode Island’s federal court.
Lawmakers also hailed the nomination of Amir Ali, tapped by the Biden administration to join the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. If approved by the full Senate, Ali — currently executive director of the reform-minded MacArthur Justice Center — would be the first Arab American to serve as a federal judge in the nation’s capital.
In a statement provided to the committee, Washington’s sole congressional Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton said that Ali “possesses all the necessary qualities to be a federal judge.”
“He has the intelligence, temperament and integrity for this position,” Norton said. “He would also bring much-needed personal and professional diversity to the federal bench.”
The group of witnesses, which also included Northern District of Illinois nominee Sunil Harjani, Eastern District of Michigan nominee Robert White and Western District of Virginia nominee Jasmine Hyejung Yoon, faced relatively tame inquiries from Democrats about their records and backgrounds.
Despite that, however, the Republican lawmakers who filtered through the committee during Thursday’s hearing had a few choice questions for some of the nominees.
“Are you still a Marxist?” Louisiana Senator John Kennedy flatly asked DuBose.
The Republican lawmaker was referring to comments the nominee made in an interview he attributed to City University of New York publishing house the Feminist Press. Kennedy read an out-of-context excerpt from the interview in which DuBose says she had a “Marxist phase.”
The comments in question were published in a 2000 article in the academic journal Women’s Studies Quarterly and were part of a series of interviews with women educators, according to a copy of the article reviewed by Courthouse News.
In the piece, DuBose — at the time a teacher at a charter school in Providence — explains that she got into teaching while working at a coffee shop near a school. Kids from the school would come into her cafe during their free periods to talk to her, she told the interviewer.
“We’d talk about what they’re doing, we’d talk about their classes, and I was in a Marxist phase,” DuBose said. “I was in a real ‘let’s talk about issues’ space in my life — loved having an audience and I liked to talk and, I don’t know, there was this organic connection.”
The nominee told Kennedy on Thursday that she did not know her comments were going to be published in the journal but explained that she was a political science major in college and the reference to Marxism could have been “what I was studying at the time.”
“When I graduated from college, I immersed myself in a ton of political theory,” DuBose said. “I read Hobbes, I read Locke and Rousseau, I read Marx. I went through a phase where I was into Eastern religion — I read the Tao Te Ching and the Analects of Confucius.”
Kennedy was not convinced by the nominee’s explanation.
“You didn’t say ‘I’m in my Hobbesian phase,’” he told DuBose, “You didn’t say ‘I’m in my Rousseau phase,’ you said, ‘I was in my Marxist phase.’”
DuBose assured the Louisiana Republican that she was not and has never been a Marxist.
Whitehouse pushed back on Kennedy’s line of questioning, pointing out that the nominee’s comments were made more than two decades ago and that her views had likely evolved.
“It was perhaps during a time when my colleague Senator Kennedy was a Democrat,” said Whitehouse. The Louisiana senator left the Democratic party and became a Republican in 2007 while he was serving as state treasurer.
Answering questions from reporters following the hearing, Durbin was dismissive of Kennedy’s attack on DuBose.
“That is a frequent question,” the Judiciary Committee chair said, apparently referring to other instances where lawmakers have grilled judicial nominees on past comments or writing. “If someone said something in college, or even high school, that mentioned Marx in any context — or even alluded to Marxism — they are bound to be questioned by this committee.”
Meanwhile, committee Republicans also pressed Ali on his leadership of the MacArthur Center, a role he assumed at the end of 2021.
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, asked Ali to answer for statements made by MacArthur Center director Cliff Johnson who said in 2020 that advocates for defunding police agencies were part of a “movement toward making police departments obsolete.”
Ali distanced himself from Johnson’s remarks, telling Graham that they were recently brought to his attention and that they left him feeling “surprised and quite disconcerted.” The nominee added that the article in which Johnson’s statement appears was penned before he became the MacArthur Center’s executive director.
“Let me be very clear about this,” Ali said. “I have never advocated for taking away police funding. I would not take that position, and the MacArthur Justice Center has not taken that position.”
As of Thursday afternoon, a committee vote on the five nominees who testified has yet to be scheduled. The panel was also slated Thursday to vote through an additional tranche of Biden nominees, but those proceedings were postponed.
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