The Senate confirmed Dale Ho on Wednesday to be a district court judge for the Southern District of New York after canceling his confirmation vote the week before.
Ho, a voting rights lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, has faced a judicial roller coaster in the 20 months since President Joe Biden nominated him for the federal bench. His nomination languished in the last Congress, with the Judiciary Committee deadlocked 11-11.
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Democrats assumed an outright majority on the panel after the midterm elections, allowing them to advance Ho and a slate of controversial nominees held over from last year.
The lawyer was supposed to receive a vote before the full Senate one week ago, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) rescheduled it after Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) came down with a sinus infection.
Her absence was not the only complicating factor for Democrats. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) came out against Ho’s nomination ahead of the vote, raising the prospect that Vice President Kamala Harris would have to step in to break a 50-50 tie.
But the absence of Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who is campaigning for president in Iowa on Wednesday night, spared Harris a trip to the Capitol. Ho was ultimately confirmed 50-49.
Republicans voted in lockstep against the nominee, citing his history of partisan tweets. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has argued his past statements show “open contempt for the Constitution.” He and his colleagues have uniformly raised concerns over a tweet in which he apparently called himself a “wild-eyed sort of leftist,” a characterization Ho says was a parody of how others see him.
Democrats tout his credentials as a voting rights lawyer who has argued high-profile cases before the Supreme Court. In 2019, he opposed then-President Donald Trump’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the census.
Ho is the latest Biden nominee to be confirmed in a party-line vote. Most of the president’s picks pass with bipartisan support, but Democrats’ threadbare majority in the Senate has frustrated Schumer’s ability to confirm more polarizing candidates.
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has denounced the nomination of Ho and others he calls “unfit” to serve in the federal judiciary.
“Let me be absolutely clear. Senate Republicans will not participate in rubber-stamping radical nominees,” McConnell said on the floor last week.
