WASHINGTON (CN) — Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday voiced their displeasure with the Biden administration’s judicial nominees as they needled the latest slate of potential jurists to appear before the upper chamber’s legal panel.
“There’s a long and unfortunate pattern in this administration of Joe Biden nominating individuals to serve on the bench who have a repeated pattern of showing excessive leniency to criminals,” Senator Ted Cruz opined. “I don’t believe doing so is in the interest of the American people.”
The Texas Republican’s comments were directed at U.S. Magistrate Judge Karoline Mehalchick, the White House’s pick to fill a vacancy on in the Middle District of Pennsylvania where she currently sits.
Mehalchick took the brunt of the GOP’s cross-examination Wednesday as lawmakers set out to impugn her record.
In particular, the jurist drew Republicans' ire with her 2019 decision to throw out a misdemeanor child-endangerment conviction against Graham Spanier, the former president of Penn State University. Spanier was removed from his position following the college’s 2011 sex abuse scandal amid reports that he had failed to respond to complaints about then-assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.
Mehalchick ruled at the time that Spanier was improperly convicted under a 2007 child endangerment law because the actions for which he was charged took place in 2001 and instructed prosecutors to retry the former university president under a previous version of the law enacted in 1995. The ruling was overturned by an appeals court in 2020 and Spanier served a two-month prison sentence.
Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn grilled Mehalchick on that decision.
“This comes across as a lack of respect for children and the rule of law,” Blackburn said, pointing to the Third Circuit decision overturning the ruling, which found that the district court judge misapplied existing case law.
Mehalchick responded that she had approached Spanier’s case like any other in her career, with “open and engaging argument” among all parties involved.
“When I issued that decision, I thought I was doing it correctly,” the judge told Blackburn. “The Third Circuit found that I did it incorrectly. I would stand by what the Third Circuit has said.”
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, the judiciary panel’s ranking member, went after Mehalchick’s broader record, pointing out that the jurist had had her rulings reversed by a higher court on 31 occasions.
Louisiana Republican John Kennedy meanwhile used his allotted five minutes of questioning time to walk through several of those cases, forcing an increasingly exasperated Mehalchick to say whether her decision had been reversed.
“You’ve been reversed a lot,” said Kennedy, holding up a printed list he called “longer than King Kong’s arm.”
Mehalchick defended her record, arguing that the number of cases in her body of work that were later reversed by higher courts was less than 2%, and that more than two-thirds of those reversals only partially walked back her rulings.
“The bulk of my work that has been appealed has been affirmed by the district court and by the Third Circuit, and I think that that exhibits a basis for having faith in my work,” Mehalchick added.
Hawaii Democrat Mazie Hirono went to bat for the nominee, pointing to a recommendation letter from U.S. District Judge Judge John Jones, whose seat Mehalchick was selected to fill in the in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Hirono too downplayed criticism of Mehalchick’s decision record, arguing that 31 reversals out of more than 1,500 rulings was actually a decent score.
“That is a success rate of 97.4%,” the Hawaii Democrat said. “That is a pretty good batting average in anybody’s opinion.”
At least one expert pushed back on Republicans’ line of questioning after Wednesday’s hearing.
“This is part of a refrain from GOP senators’ 2024 playbook to portray Democrats as soft on crime,” said Carl Tobias, chair of the University of Richmond Law School. “However, it is quantitatively and qualitatively false with respect to Biden nominees.”
Tobias observed that Mehalchick “showed fine temperament” in responding to GOP needling and pointing out that reversals only comprised a small percentage of her rulings.
Although Mehalchick was largely under the GOP microscope, lawmakers also dialed in on the other five judicial appointees who testified before the judiciary panel Wednesday. Republican committee members questioned the nominees on their support for whistleblowers, nodding to a pair of whistleblowers from the Internal Revenue Service who came forward last week to accuse the Justice Department of slow-walking an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
Graham pressed Southern District of Delaware nominee Jennifer Hall on her knowledge of U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s inquiry into President Biden’s son. Hall had until 2019 served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Delaware.
Now a magistrate judge, Hall cited the judicial code of conduct and said she could not comment on a pending investigation, but told Graham that she had not been involved in the Hunter Biden probe.
Margaret Garnett, tapped by the Biden administration to fill a vacancy on the Southern District of New York, said that while whistleblower complaints should be taken seriously, “my own approach would not be to take the word of any whistleblower … at face value.”
Tobias noted Hall was “very poised” in her response to Graham and said Hall “possesses much valuable experience and seems perfectly suited” for the Delaware federal court.
“Garnett was very clear and comprehensive in her answers, even when the senators asked her very difficult and some politicized questions about certain probes and cases,” the professor added.
Wednesday’s hearing proceeded in the absence of Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, who chairs the judiciary committee. Durbin announced over the weekend that he had tested positive for Covid-19 — his third case in the last year — and was recovering from the illness at home.
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