US Senate confirms former Thomas clerk, transgender sports opponent to judgeships

By Nate Raymond

Feb 5 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed two of President Donald Trump's latest nominees to serve as federal judges, including a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and a lawyer who challenged the participation of transgender athletes in collegiate women's sports.

The Republican-led Senate voted 50-46 along party lines in favor of U.S. Department of Justice attorney Brian Lea joining the bench in the Western District of Tennessee and 50-47 in favor of litigator Justin Olson becoming a judge in the Southern District of Indiana.

Those votes brought to 33 the number of judicial nominees the Senate has confirmed during Trump's second term, as the Republican president looks to continue putting his conservative stamp on the judiciary and building on the 234 appointments he made to the bench during his first four years in office that shifted the judiciary significantly to the right.

The White House has slowed down on submitting additional nominees for the Senate's consideration, with only four others pending and no additional ones submitted in time for any further nomination hearings to be held in February, as a dearth in new judicial vacancies drags on.

Lea, a former Thomas clerk, was a partner at Jones Day before joining the Justice Department near the start of Trump's return to office, and spent most of his career practicing law in Georgia, not Tennessee, where he grew up but had not been licensed to practice until last year.

As a deputy associate attorney general, Lea defended against challenges to efforts by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies to sharply cut research funding provided to universities, moves that were repeatedly blocked by federal judges in Boston.

Trump nominated Olson, a lawyer at Kroger Gardis & Regas, in November, touting how he "has been fighting tirelessly to keep men out of women’s sports."

Olson had represented former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines and other current and former college athletes in a lawsuit challenging the now-rescinded NCAA policies that allowed transgender women to compete in women's sports as long as they met testosterone limits on a sport-by-sport basis.

He faced a rare grilling from a member of Trump's own party, Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on December 17, as Kennedy pressed him about sermons he delivered as an ordained elder of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America.

Those church talks included statements describing premarital sex as a category of "sexual perversions," suggesting wives should be subservient to their husbands, and describing "persons with physical disabilities that might prevent the robust marriage that we're called to."

Despite those questions, Kennedy voted on January 15 to advance Olson's nomination to the full Senate for its consideration, saying that after meeting with the nominee, he was assured Olson would not take his personal opinions to the bench and would "simply apply the rule of law."

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Trump taps former Thomas clerk, transgender sports foe for judgeships