WASHINGTON (CN) - The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday advanced the nomination of a Transportation Department official who has been tapped to replace Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general at the Justice Department.
Jeffrey Rosen has served a deputy secretary at the Transportation Department since 2017 and also spent time as general counsel at the agency during the George W. Bush administration. Rosen also served as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget and spent 2009 to 2017 as a partner at the Washington, D.C. firm Kirkland & Ellis.
He will replace the outgoing Rosenstein, who appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller and oversaw his investigation for much of its two-year run. Rosenstein resigned his position in April and is set to officially leave the Justice Department on Saturday.
Rosen cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 12-10 party-line vote, as Democrats said he does not have the experience necessary to hold the number-two position at the agency. The deputy attorney general sits just below the attorney general on the Justice Department's organizational chart and oversees the department's various divisions.
Democrats particularly raised concerns that Rosen has never worked as a prosecutor, considering one of his responsibilities as deputy attorney general would be to oversee the work of U.S. attorneys.
While Rosen told the committee he would use the expertise of "highly capable" prosecutors and other criminal law experts at the agency to make up for his lack of experience, Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said it would be better to have someone on the job who is intimately familiar with the issues on his own.
"I appreciate Mr. Rosen's willingness to work with the department's career prosecutors to get up to speed on various law enforcement and national security matters, but the truth is we can't and shouldn't afford to have somebody who is learning on the job," Feinstein said. "We need a deputy attorney general who has the experience to exhibit the knowledge and integrity required to those leading these important departmental efforts."
While Rosen's supporters have said his lengthy experience managing large numbers of employees in federal agencies makes him qualified for the role, Senator Dick Durbin said Rosenstein's tenure at the agency has shown how far beyond managing employees the responsibilities of the deputy attorney general can stretch.
"After Rod Rosenstein, we know the deputy attorney general can have significant responsibilities beyond the obvious, not just in the daily running of the Department of Justice, but in matters that have serious impact on justice in our nation," Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said Thursday.
Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the Judiciary Committee, said Rosen's level of experience is not unusual for the position and that his time at the Treasury Department has prepared him for the job.
"This is not a prosecutor's job," Graham said. "The job of deputy attorney general, among others, is to manage the organization, which is $28 billion and more than 100,000 employees."
In addition to Rosen, the Judiciary Committee also advanced four of President Donald Trump's nominees to federal district courts.
These included two particularly controversial nominees to positions on federal courts in Texas - Texas Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Brown and Brantley Starr, who currently works in the Texas attorney general's office.
Nominated to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Brown in particular drew questions about public comments he made on abortion, gay marriage and other issues while campaigning for his current seat.
In 2015, Brown said the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held there is a fundamental right to marriage, was an example of when judges "legislate from the bench."
Brown also faced questions about his decision to tweet out links to the dissenting opinions in Roe v. Wade on the anniversary of the decision. He particularly pointed out a line in Justice Byron White's opinion stating that he found "nothing in the language or history of the Constitution" supporting the majority's holding in the case that legalized abortion nationally.
When asked about the tweets in questions submitted in writing after his nomination hearing, Brown called Roe "longstanding, binding precedent," and said he tweeted the links as part of the campaign for his seat on the court.
"In Texas, judges are selected in partisan elections," Brown wrote in his response. "As a Texas state judge who had to frequently stand for election, I used Twitter as a political campaign tool."
Brown gave a similar answer when asked about comments he made to the Bell County Young Republicans in which he called rulings against Trump's so-called travel ban an "attempted a coup d'etat," and said the reasoning of the judges who wrote the opinions "is not based in law but in their belief that we have an illegitimate president."
Brown cleared the committee in a 12-10 vote.
Starr, who is up for a spot on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, faced questions about his work in the Texas government, particularly on the issue of voting rights. In addition to working to defend a Texas voter ID law, he penned a letter last year to the Texas Senate's Select Committee on Election Integrity urging the committee to look at "widespread abuse of voting assistance procedures to coerce and influence voters."
Starr told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he based the letter on a survey of four Texas counties that found 165 people who were not citizens cast 100 votes in state elections before being taken off the voting rolls. He said some of the evidence that supported the letter remains privileged.
Starr cleared the committee 12-10 as well.
Robert Colville, who is nominated to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, received approval from the committee with a 14-8 vote, but unlike most Trump nominees, he received more support from Democrats than from Republicans.
A judge on the Allegheny County Common Pleas Court since 2000, Colville was initially nominated to the position by President Barack Obama in 2015, but never received a vote in the Senate. Trump re-nominated him for the bench in March.
Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said after the vote that Republican opposition to Colville was due to his positions on issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Colville ran as a Democrat for positions on the Pennsylvania Superior Court in 2009 and 2015.
"That political support is fine if someone wants to run for political office, but it is not the role or responsibility of a federal judge," Cruz told Courthouse News on Thursday.
The committee also approved the nomination of Stephanie Haines, who has worked as a federal prosecutor in Pennsylvania since 2007 and is also up for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. Haines received broad support from the committee, moving forward with a 21-1 vote, with Senator Kamala Harris, a California Democrat who is running for president, being the only senator on the panel to vote against her.
All of the nominees the committee approved Thursday now go to the full Senate, where they await confirmation votes.
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