On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first in a series of eight “Arctic Frost Accountability” subcommittee hearings, which are ostensibly intended to provide oversight of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The real purpose, though, is to provide Republican senators with more camera time to relitigate the results of that election and the January 6 insurrection that followed.
In his opening remarks, Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, confronted his Republican colleagues over “their undying fealty to the president’s abnormal behavior” and “his attempt to whitewash history.” But he also called out another group of people who have been doing the same of late: Trump’s judicial nominees.
“Have you seen the contortions that these nominees have gone through when they’re asked the basic question, ‘Who won the election in 2020?’” Durbin asked. “They won’t answer. They go through these painful contortions. They can’t answer it because it’s an article of faith: If you’re loyal to Trump, you never accept the premise that he lost an election.”
Durbin is referring to the fact that, to date, all 37 of Trump’s second-term judicial nominees have refused to answer simple questions related to the 2020 election and the insurrection. Instead, nominees typically state only that President Joe Biden “was certified” as the victor, and they claim that as nominees, it would be “inappropriate” for them to say that the Capitol was attacked on January 6 (which they describe as a “political controversy”).
One explanation for this behavior is that nominees understand that if they don’t go along with the president’s conspiracy theories, their nominations would be immediately pulled. The other explanation is that they believe in these conspiracy theories, too.
Durbin has raised this pattern a number of times during Judiciary Committee meetings. In June, for example, he said he could not support the confirmation of Cristian Stevens, whom Trump nominated to a district court judgeship in Missouri, in light of Stevens’s inability to “acknowledge these basic facts and denounce the violence perpetrated against law enforcement on this day.”
Just last week, though, Durbin voted to confirm two of Trump’s nominees, David Clay Fowlkes and Aaron Peterson, to serve as life-tenured federal judges. And he’s not the only one: During Trump’s second term, 19 Democrats have voted to confirm at least one of Trump’s nominees. New Hampshire Senators Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen have voted to confirm six and seven nominees, respectively, and Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, has voted for five. Among Senate Democrats, Durbin and Virginia Senator Tim Kaine are tied for the lead in this ignominious category with eight yes votes apiece.
