Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee stormed out of an executive committee meeting Thursday moments before the panel voted to advance President Donald Trump’s judicial nominee, Emil Bove, to the full Senate floor for a vote.
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., urged Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, before the vote to allow them to consider the allegations against Bove made by a former Justice Department attorney, Erez Reuveni, in a whistleblower report.
Booker invoked Rule 4 of the committee rules in trying to push for additional debate time, which Grassley declined to acknowledge before ordering the vote — prompting the Democrat members of the panel to abruptly exit the hearing room.
Shortly before walking out, Booker took aim at Grassley. ‘What are you afraid of?’ he erupted, after Grassley tried to speak over him and hold the vote. ‘Debating this [nomination], putting things on the record — Dear God,’ he said, ‘that’s what we are here for.’
‘This lacks decency, this lacks decorum, it shows that you will not hear from your colleagues,’ Booker said to Grassley in another attempt. ‘You are a decent man,’ he said, imploring him to allow a small window of additional time for the panel to debate before pushing through with the committee vote.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Booker pressed again.
‘What are they saying to you,’ he said, referring to the Trump administration, ‘that is making you do something to violate the decorum, the decency and the respect of this committee to at least hear each other out?’
The nearly hour-long debate held prior to Bove’s confirmation vote was unsuccessful, and Trump’s nominee cleared the committee in a party-line vote.
Still, there were sharp objections made by other Democrats on the panel, including Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-NY, who joined Booker in upbraiding their Republican colleagues on the panel for what they described as a lack of candor and their refusal to consider the allegations made by Reuveni.
They also noted the dozens of former federal and state judges, and hundreds of former federal prosecutors, who had the panel to reject Bove’s nomination to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench.
Whitehouse, for his part, invoked Shakespeare: ‘There’s something rotten in Denmark,’ he said in voicing his opposition to the decision to push through with the confirmation vote.
Booker ended the sharp exchange with Grassley by saying simply, ‘This is wrong, sir, and I join with my colleagues in leaving,’ before streaming out of the committe room.
Trump announced earlier this year the nomination of senior Justice Department official and his former defense attorney, Emil Bove, to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Bove’s nomination immediately sparked intense pushback and opposition from some lawmakers, and from the former prosecutors and judges.
It comes as Trump administration officials have taken aim at the so-called ‘activist’ judges they argue are blocking the president’s agenda and preventing him from enacting his sweeping policy goals, including the administration’s crackdown on border security and immigration.
Bove’s path to confirmation in the full Senate chamber remains rocky, and comes amid mounting concerns over the allegations made in the whistleblower report.
Speaking to reporters after leaving the committee room on Thursday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-CT, described the decision by Republicans to push through with the vote without considering the whistleblower allegations in a separate hearing, and despite the state objections of Democrats on the panel as a ‘blatant violation of the rules of committee.’
‘I haven’t seen anything like it in 15 years in the U.S. Senate,’ he told reporters. ‘Just overriding, roughshod, the rules of the committee to silence members [on concerns involving] the nominees for lifetime appointments’ on the federal bench, he said.
‘We can disagree about whether they should be on the court, but not about the rules that put them there.’