Name: Ted Lehman
Hometown: Lancaster, Pa.
Position: Chief nominations counsel, Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans
Age: 38
Alma mater: University of Pennsylvania; Georgetown Law School
—-
Washington Examiner: What brought you to Washington, D.C.?
Lehman: I was in New York for a year or two right after school and I moved down here in the end of 2001, beginning of ’02, and at that point worked for [then-Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah]. I worked for him for a couple years, then left when, at the beginning of 2005 or so, when his chairmanship ended. I went and clerked for a year for a judge here in town, Chief Judge Thomas Hogan, who was then chief judge of [D.C. District Court]. I then worked for a law firm for a couple years.
Examiner: When did you go to law school?
Lehman: I went at night while I was up here, while I was working.
Examiner: How did you do Georgetown Law at night and committee work during the day?
Lehman: Well, the classes are all in the evening. I did most of my studying on weekends or early in the morning, and I also took classes through every summer, basically. So, I kind of went straight through and did it in about three-and-a-half years or so. It kept you busy. It was before I was married and had kids, [so] it was manageable.
Examiner: So you were at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld LLP, litigating — I imagine it was mostly corporate stuff?
Lehman: I was working on civil litigation, some white collar work, defending class actions, that type of thing. And then I came back in 2009 when Sen. [Jeff] Sessions took over as ranking member. I worked for him for whatever that was, a couple years, until Sen. [Chuck] Grassley took over as ranking member beginning in 2011. And he asked me to stay on and I did.
Examiner: When you came back to work for Sessions, is that when you stepped in as nominations counsel?
Lehman: I came back initially to work on [Supreme Court Justice Sonia] Sotomayor’s nomination.
Examiner: What’s the job description of nominations counsel?
Lehman: When the nomination is received in the Senate from the president, the first thing we do is send out to the home-state senators what’s called a blue-slip. It’s literally a blue slip of paper that asks the home-state senators whether or not they approve of the nomination. That’s a whole process that has a history of its own. That tradition reaches back almost 100 years. What it ensures is that on the front end of the process, long before we ever receive the nomination, that the White House and the home-state senators have to worm together to some degree to arrive at a nomination that they can all agree on. They certainly have disagreement from time to time, that’s nothing new. But it’s a process that has proven itself over the years, to work pretty well. In the history of that, which is what, maybe 100 years, we’ve never had a district court nomination reported out of committee without a blue-slip being returned in support [from] the home-state senators and we’ve never confirmed a circuit court nominee without the support of the home-state senators. And that’s a testament to the process especially when you’ve got some states with conservative senators and a president of the United States who does not view the world in the same way that they do arriving on candidates that they can agree on.
Examiner: What’s your job as nominations counsel within that process?
Lehman: We have several other colleagues, we work together on it. We basically try to do our own review of the nomination. If they’ve served as a judge before — if they were a magistrate judge, if they were a state court judge — you’ll have a lot of opinions to work through and read and do the best job we can at reviewing their records. Ultimately, we’ll brief the chairman on those nominees and their records and whether or not they have home-state support, etc., and whether or not there’s anything that he might be concerned within their records and make recommendations. And he’ll accept those recommendations or not accept those recommendations and give us direction from there. We’ve done a number of these and know what his concerns would be as a general matter. So, we try to give a full scope review of each nominee. It’s a time-consuming process, but we try to be thorough. And, again, that’s for lower-court nominations.
Examiner: You said you came back to the committee when Sotomayor’s nomination was up for Supreme Court. Judge Merrick Garland is the third Supreme Court nominee since you arrived. How is it different this time around?
Lehman: Obviously, there’s a debate going on right now about the Supreme Court. The Senate isn’t moving forward on that nomination, but we’re having a debate nonetheless. The chairman and others have talked a lot about wanting to have a debate about the appropriate role of a Supreme Court [justice] and the court more generally. He’s talked a lot about the role of the court and [how] judges should understand that the role of the court is a limited one and subservient to the Constitution. He believes that’s an important debate to have and we should have it. And that’s a big part of the debate we’re having now.
Examiner: How big is your team?
Lehman: We’ve got four or five lawyers working on these issues, but they’re working on other issues as well, not just on judges. Yeah, we’re busy. But the committee — I couldn’t turn down coming back because the job, they’re fun issues to work on and we have a lot of colleagues who are exceptionally talented, both on our staff and more broadly on the committee. Republicans and Democrats, you have a lot of really smart lawyers who could be doing a lot of other things but who are dedicated professionals who want to be working on these issues. It’s hard to overstate how smart some of these lawyers are. We have a couple former Supreme Court clerks that are on staff — Ryan Newman, for instance, springs to mind. He works for [Sen. Ted] Cruz and he’s a former [Supreme Court Justice Samuel] Alito clerk. And there are others. But it’s just an atmosphere that’s fun to work in.
Examiner: What do you do when you’re not here? Any hobbies?
Lehman: Well, I’ve got an 8-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 1-year-old, so they keep me pretty busy. In fact, I need to get moving here shortly because we’ve got a little league game this evening. So, they keep me on my toes when I’m not here.
