Yesterday, Kyrsten Sinema voted against one of President Biden’s qualified judicial nominees, despite her history of having voted for nearly 100 of Donald Trump’s nominees, including anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-worker judges.
The nominee in question, Judge S. Kato Crews for the U.S. District Court in Colorado, was already a federal magistrate judge, the first Black magistrate judge in his district, and was recommended to the President by Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet of Colorado. Judge Crews was confirmed 51-48 in a bipartisan vote, with every Democrat, including Senator Mark Kelly, along with Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voting in his favor. He received his law degree from the University of Arizona and previously served as a staff attorney at the National Labor Relations Board.
Sinema’s office gave no reason for her opposition.
“Kyrsten Sinema voted to confirm 95 of Trump’s judges, including some of the worst of the worst with anti-choice, anti-gay, and anti-worker records, but apparently a federal magistrate recommended by her Democratic colleagues, who received bipartisan support in the Senate, was the first Black judge on his court, and has a law degree from the University of Arizona is somehow not qualified,” said Sacha Haworth, spokesperson for Replace Sinema PAC.
Although Sinema’s time in the Senate only overlapped with Trump’s presidency for two years, she was a reliable confirmation vote for Trump appointees. Here are some of the the most egregious judges Sinema voted to confirm during the Trump years:
- Michael Liburdi, U.S. District Judge For The District of Arizona, who served as chairman of the Arizona Right To Life PAC and was a close advisor to Gov. Doug Ducey while he signed anti-choice measures into law.
- Matthew McFarland, U.S. District Judge For The Southern District Of Ohio, was strongly opposed by Planned Parenthood due to his anti-choice record and at one point had to amend his Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire for not fully disclosing ties to an Ohio Right To Life organization.
- Douglas Cole, U.S. District Judge For The Southern District Of Ohio, defended a law that requires women to wait 24 hours after being lectured by a physician before they access abortion care.
- Mark Pittman, U.S. District Judge For The Northern District Of Texas, made anti-choice speeches and publicly spoke out against Obama-era regulations that he said would have forced doctors to provide abortion care.
- Sean Jordan, U.S. District Judge For The Eastern District Of Texas, filed an amicus brief on behalf of 43 anti-choice Congress members in support of a pharmacy that refused to carry emergency contraceptives.
- Wendy Williams Berger, U.S. District Judge For The Middle District of Florida, who helped prosecute a woman for manslaughter by arguing that her past use of abortion care was evidence of her guilt even as she maintained that she delivered a stillborn.
- Clifton Corker, U.S. District Judge For The Eastern District of Tennessee, who was president of Students For America, a conservative club at James Madison University known for pushing anti-abortion and anti-gay views.
- Peter Phipps, U.S. Circuit Judge for the Third Circuit who received an award from the Bush Administration for defending the “Partial Birth Abortion Act” and who defended a policy banning undocumented women and victims of human trafficking in government custody from receiving abortion care.
- Kenneth Bell, U.S. District Judge For The Western District of North Carolina, who onced penned an op-ed discussing the “indefensibility of the abortion rights position.”
- Carl Nichols, U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia, who once represented a pharmacy that claimed it should be able to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives.
- Taylor McNeel, U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Mississippi who allowed school officials to bar a transgender girl from her graduation ceremony unless she dressed “like a boy.”
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