WASHINGTON (CN) – Senate Democrats grilled several of President Donald Trump's judicial nominees Wednesday, calling into question everything from one candidate's views on corporal punishment to another's taste for office decor that evokes the confederacy.
In all, six nominees appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday; five tapped for judicial posts, the fifth to be an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department.
All of the nominees were conservatives, and all appeared to have the solid support of Republicans on the committee after roughly four hours of testimony.
The first to address the committee was Stephanos Bibas, a former federal prosecutor from New York City, who has been nominated for a seat on the Third Circuit.
Prior to joining the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan, Bibas clerked for U.S. Circuit Judge Patrick Higginbotham and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.
The Yale Law School graduate is also listed as an expert on the website of the Federalist Society, the conservative organization that has had a hand in picking several of Trump's nominees.
Bibas left the U.S. Attorney's Office in 2000 to accept a fellowship from Yale, and since then he's been employed as a professor at Pennsylvania Law School, where he's acquired a national reputation in the area of criminal procedure.
But it was an unpublished, 61-page article that Bibas wrote, entitled "Corporal Punishment, Not Imprisonment," that seemed to most interest Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois on Wednesday.
As described by Durbin, the article advocated the use of "non-disfiguring corporal punishment, such as electric shock,” for most incarcerated individuals, and stated that “lengthy imprisonment adds up to far more needless pain than a brief electrical shock which leaves an offender free to work, to parent.”
Bibas told the committee he no longer espouses the views he set forth in the paper, that he considers corporal punishment wrong and un-American, and that he categorically rejected it in his 2012 book, "The Machinery of Criminal Justice."
"But you weren't a kid when you wrote this," Durbin said. "You had been around awhile. You were a professor. How can you hold such an extreme view ... and then three years later, disavow it completely?"
Bibas said he struggled with the concept of corporal punishment before and after finishing the lengthy paper and concluded it had been "a crazy idea."
"I never published it because I realized it was a crazy idea, but I only considered it in the context of more productive and shorter punishments. This was part of the creative process and a way forward."
Michael Joseph Juneau, a Harvard alum, is nominated for a federal judgeship in the Western District of Louisiana.
He told the committee Wednesday that his experience in private practice has given him a great appreciation for the challenges judges confront from the bench.
“It’s a tough job, frankly, and a judge has an opportunity to things that are honorable, impartial and respectful," Juneau said. "That’s what I take away most from private practice. They need to have people on the bench that respect not only lawyers, but litigants, staff, secretaries [and treat them] with the respect due of all people who appear before the court.”
Republican lawmakers praised Juneau 's credentials, but Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, chose to focus instead on his membership with the conservative Christian nonprofit, Alliance Defending Freedom.