US Senate panel advances Trump's first five judicial nominees

By Nate Raymond

June 26 (Reuters) - A Republican-led U.S. Senate panel voted along party lines on Thursday to advance President Donald Trump's first five judicial nominees of his second term, including a former clerk to three members of the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority for a seat on a federal appeals court.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-10 in favor of sending Whitney Hermandorfer's nomination to the full Senate for it to consider whether to confirm her to a life-tenured position on the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The panel also advanced the nominations of four candidates to serve as federal trial court judges in Missouri's Eastern District over the opposition of Democrats who assailed some of the nominees' records on abortion and LGBTQ rights.

They are the first of the 12 judicial nominees the Republican president has announced to date to clear the committee. The votes set the stage for the Senate to confirm them and add to the 234 judicial appointments Trump made in his first term.

Those 234 appointments helped shift the ideological balance of the federal judiciary to the right and included three members of the U.S. Supreme Court who helped give the high court its current 6-3 conservative majority.

Trump is seeking to add new judges even as he and his administration rail against members of the judiciary for participating in a "judicial coup" by blocking core parts of his immigration and cost-cutting agenda that they have concluded are unlawful.

Senator Chuck Grassley, the committee's Republican chair, hailed the five candidates under consideration as "truly excellent, well-qualified nominees."

Hermandorfer clerked for conservative Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett, and clerked for Justice Brett Kavanaugh while he was a judge on a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

Today, she heads a strategic litigation unit in Republican Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti's office, where she has defended the state's near-total abortion ban and challenged a rule adopted under former Democratic President Joe Biden barring discrimination against transgender students.

Senator Dick Durbin, the committee's top Democrat, spoke out against Hermandorfer, citing her "inexperience, her partisan ideology, and her apparent willingness to support even the most unlawful efforts of the Trump administration."

He said not only was her record "extreme" but also short. He noted that Hermandorfer, 37, and two of Trump's Missouri nominees, Missouri Solicitor General Joshua Divine and federal prosecutor Zachary Bluestone, only graduated law school within the last decade.

Durbin and other Democrats spoke out sharply against Divine, who Durbin said had taken extreme positions on reproductive rights and ballot access and referred to himself as a "zealot" for anti-abortion causes.

Several Democrats noted that Divine, while a college student, wrote an op-ed arguing in favor of prospective voters being required to pass literacy tests, which southern states used during the Jim Crow era to prevent Black people from casting ballots before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When Democrats asked Divine about the op-ed, he said he condemned Jim Crow literacy tests and that he wrote the article as a teenager when he was not fully aware of the law surrounding such tests. But Democratic Senator Peter Welch said he had a hard time believing it was a mere college indiscretion.

"I was in college," Welch said. "You were in college. And the views that he's expressed then, and I think still adheres to, are, I think, really, really extreme and have no place on the bench."

The panel nonetheless voted 12-10 in favor of Divine, Bluestone and the two other Missouri judicial nominees, Maria Lanahan, who like Divine works in the Missouri attorney general's office, and Judge Cristian Stevens.

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