Democrats work to push remaining Biden judges through Senate committee

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday questioned what is likely to be the penultimate slate of judicial appointees from President Joe Biden, as Democrats work to fill as many court vacancies as possible before January.

Though the two nominees, both tapped to join federal courts in California, faced light questioning from only a few senators gathered in the committee chamber, the eleventh-hour confirmation hearing at times took on a familiar, partisan tone.

With only a few weeks left in the Senate’s lame duck session and a Republican majority looming next year, Democrats are focused solely on cementing Biden’s legacy by confirming the remainder of his court nominees. The upper chamber has this week held a marathon of confirmation votes in the face of opposition from Republicans, who have pulled procedural levers to slow the process down.

But there are some nominees who still need to be voted out of the Judiciary Committee before they can head to the Senate floor — a process the panel began Wednesday as it interviewed Benjamin Cheeks, who was nominated to the Southern District of California, and Serena Murillo, tapped by the White House to fill a vacancy on the Central District of California.

Both nominees faced sharp cross-examination by Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, one of the only Republican members present during the hearing. Kennedy questioned Cheeks, currently a magistrate judge in the Southern District of California, on a trio of articles he wrote as a defense attorney.

Democrats were clearly prepared for this line of questioning: Before Kennedy was recognized, committee chairman Senator Dick Durbin asked Cheeks to explain the thinking behind his work. The nominee said he'd written a “variety” of articles on criminal justice and race, but he didn’t stake out a clear position in most of those pieces.

“Mostly, what I wanted to do was to educate the reader on what was going on, identify the fact that there are some issues or problems going on in the world, and just throw out the question of ‘How can we solve it?' without stating how to solve it,” Cheeks told Durbin.

The nominee explained that he felt his position and experiences, particularly as a Black man, would be helpful in shaping conversations within the legal community.

But Kennedy was predictably unconvinced by the assertion that Cheeks hadn’t taken positions in his writing.

“You didn’t succeed,” he told the nominee.

He also took issue with Cheeks’ characterization of protests that followed the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He read from an October 2020 article published by the nominee calling the demonstrations “mostly peaceful” and observing that police officers “became the villain in a sea of protesters.”

Kennedy pointed to another article penned by Cheeks, in which the nominee reflects on parenting, dialing in on what he wrote about teaching his children to interact with law enforcement.

“I have a guarded opinion about police,” Kennedy read aloud from Cheeks’ article. “How do I teach my sons to respect them and fear them at the same time? There can be no question that police officers have some of these same internal of external biases.”

Cheeks did not dispute the veracity of those quotes, but instead explained that his article was aimed at laying out his thoughts about the best way to raise his kids, who are mixed Black and Hispanic.

“I wanted to tell my apprehensions about how I’m going to raise them, with regards to how they’re going to be able to deal with challenges in life, but particularly challenges because of their skin color,” he said. “I wanted to express some apprehensions about having those difficult conversations with my kids.”

Kennedy also grilled Murillo, the Central District nominee, demanding that she explain statements she made on a 2022 episode of a social issues podcast called Visible Voices. The lawmaker contended that she had called for “quotas based on gender” in the legal profession.

Reading a quote purportedly from the podcast, Kennedy said Murillo, currently a judge in Los Angeles Superior Court, called on women to “hold men who are in these positions accountable” and ask why there isn’t equal gender representation among supervising judges.

But those words don’t appear on a transcript of Murillo’s episode of Visible Voices. A spokesperson for Kennedy’s office did not return a request for copies of his source material.

The nominee, for her part, also denied having ever said anything of the sort.

“I have never advocated on behalf of quotas,” she said. “I think that’s undisputed.”

Murillo also defended comments she made on the podcast about diversity on the federal bench.

“At the time that the Constitution was written, there is no question that it did not include women, and it did not include people of color in the definition of ‘we the people,’” she told lawmakers. “All I was commenting on is that diversity in the judiciary builds integrity in the system and public confidence in those institutions.”

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