Leaders on the Senate Judiciary Committee sparred Wednesday about the American Bar Association’s role in reviewing judicial nominations, as the panel held its first judicial confirmation hearing of the new Trump administration.
Before senators questioned the nominees, Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the panel, pointed to Attorney General Pamela Bondi’s announcement last week that judicial picks would not sit for ABA interviews or respond to questionnaires prepared by the organization.
“This is an historic meeting for the approval of federal judges. We’re doing things differently today than they’ve even been done since I’ve served in the United States Senate,” Durbin said.
The ABA vetting process involves contacting a nominee’s peers and colleagues, Durbin said, and the organization rated several nominees during the first Trump term as not qualified.
“The attorney general has decided to protect against the vulnerability that some nominees, maybe even some today, might have been found unqualified. I think that’s a mistake,” he said.
Durbin also brought up Trump’s social media post about The Federalist Society, in which the president wrote he was “so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations.”
The president also called Leonard Leo, a co-chairman of the organization and a fixture in the nation’s conservative legal movement who helped consult on judicial nominations in his first term, “a bad person.”
“When they toss out the American Bar Association, and they toss out the Federalist Society, they don’t want anyone looking over the shoulders of the nominees to find out what they believe, what they’ve said, what they’ve done,” Durbin said. “I don’t get it. I don’t think that’s in the best interest of picking the right people for the judiciary of either political party.”
Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, responded that Bondi’s decision to remove special access was “hardly surprising” and said the ABA has decided to act as a “partisan, progressive organization.”
Grassley also recalled a moment during the Biden administration in which a nominee the ABA rated as “qualified” could not recall the purpose of Article 2 of the Constitution during a hearing.
“The ABA’s political bias is obvious. It has been for years. It’s no surprise that the current administration doesn’t trust the ABA to be a neutral arbiter,” Grassley said.
Bondi, in a letter to the ABA’s president posted on social media, accused the organization of not being a “fair arbiter” of nominees’ qualifications. She also added that the department’s Office of Legal Policy would no longer tell nominees to give waivers to allow the organization access to nonpublic information such as bar records.
U.S. attorney holds
At the hearing, Grassley also turned attention to Durbin’s announcement that he’s putting a hold on Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida — and might do so for other U.S. attorney nominees who reach the Senate floor.
Grassley said confirming U.S. attorney nominees via roll call votes would take up more than 230 hours of Senate floor time.
Durbin has cited the actions of Vice President JD Vance when he was the junior senator from Ohio. It was Vance who decided to disrupt the tradition of fast-tracking the confirmation of U.S. attorney nominees on the floor, Durbin said.
Durbin said he had even warned that Democrats would have to change their approach in the future because there can’t be one set of rules for Republicans and another for Democrats.
All U.S. attorneys in Trump’s first term were approved by voice vote on the floor, Durbin said. But Vance during the Biden administration objected to voice votes “so he wanted to put two or three days of procedure into the choice of each of the U.S. attorneys.”
“It stopped the process. As the chairman just noted, when you start taking three days or four days for 93 nominees, you start eating up the calendar of the Senate and they can’t do anything else,” Durbin said.
“I’ve been saying to Chairman Grassley, ‘You expect me to just look the other way now?’ U.S. attorneys are coming before us, and I’m supposed to say, ‘Well, let’s go back to voice votes again.’ One set of rules for Democrats, another set of rules for Republicans. That’s the mess we’re in,” Durbin said. “We can work this out, and we should.”
The Iowa Republican said he understands where some Democrats are coming from because several U.S. attorney nominees were subjected to GOP holds during the Biden administration.
But, Grassley said, those actions would not justify Democrats making a blanket hold and said maybe he and Durbin could work it out.
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