3 black, Hispanic judicial nominees Biden voted against confirming

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Tuesday, February 01, 2022

(L-R) U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., leads the way for judicial nominees Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owens following a meeting and photo opportunity in Frist's office at the U.S. Capitol May 17, 2005, in Washington, D.C. Senate Republicans have vowed to change the Senate rules if necessary to break the logjam of judicial nominees sent for confirmation by U.S. President George W. Bush. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

3. DC Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Janice Rogers Brown

President George W. Bush nominated Janice Rogers Brown, an African American woman, to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2003. As with Estrada, the Senate failed to invoke cloture on Brown’s nomination, with Biden joining nearly all Democrats in opposing her confirmation.

The Republicans increased their majority in the Senate following the 2004 election, and Bush renominated Brown for the same post in 2005. When the Senate voted to confirm Brown in 2005, Biden joined nearly all other Democrats in opposing her nomination. In the cloture vote that occurred immediately before Brown’s confirmation vote, Biden was one of the 32 senators who voted against ending debate on her nomination.

Fox News opinion host Laura Ingraham brought up Biden’s past opposition to Brown when weighing in on Breyer’s retirement and the push to replace him with an African American woman on her primetime show, “The Ingraham Angle,” last week. “He voted three times against confirming her just to be a U.S. Circuit Court Judge,” she recalled.

“I mean, this wasn’t even to the Supreme Court. So, race and gender, they only count if you’re thought to be a committed judicial activist, judicial leftist,” Ingraham concluded.

Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative think-tank that sympathizes with the originalist view of the Constitution, agreed with Ingraham. “If he really cared about trying to get more black women on the federal courts, he wouldn’t have been holding up Janice Rogers Brown’s nomination for so long and at such length.”

Fox News host Dana Perino, who worked in the George W. Bush administration, contended that Biden and other Democrats had an especially sinister motive for working so hard to block Rogers’ confirmation. “Anonymously, they told the … media that it was because they didn’t want the Republicans to have a shot at nominating the first … black woman to the Supreme Court,” she reported.