Gavel Grab

U.S. District Judge David Hamilton, President Obama’s first judicial pick after occupying the White House in January, won Senate confirmation to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Thursday after a bruising and often partisan battle.

The Senate voted 59 to 39 to confirm Judge Hamilton, portrayed by supporters as a moderate sitting in the heartland state of Indiana and by his critics as a liberal, judicial activist.  Among his supporters was home-state Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican. Earlier this week, Democrats rounded up more than the 60 votes needed to end a Republican-led filibuster against the nomination.

Once the filibuster was broken, the outcome was clinched. The Fort Wayne (Indiana) News-Sentinel editorialized in advance, and with resignation, about the new political landscape:

“Obama–either over the next three years or the next seven–has the power to drastically alter the bench and, therefore, the future of this country. And Republicans, at least for now, can’t stop him. Elections have consequences.”

The filibuster was led by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. As  Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted in a column, Sessions stoutly decried filibusters when Democrats used them to block Republican George W. Bush’s nominees.

“I opposed filibusters before,” Sessions acknowledged recently. But in the case of Judge Hamilton, “I don’t agree with his judicial philosophy. Therefore, I believe this side cannot acquiesce into a philosophy that says that Democratic presidents can get their judges confirmed with 50 votes.”

Of Sessions and like-minded Republicans who changed their views on filibusters, Milbank wrote, “When you’re in politics, a certain amount of hypocrisy comes with the job. Still, what happened on the Senate floor Tuesday stretched even the senatorial capacity to suspend shame to new levels of elasticity.”

Hamilton became the eighth judicial nominee picked by Obama to be confirmed, according to the Associated Press, and the third judge confirmed for an appeals bench.

Some of the attacks on Judge Hamilton were vitriolic. Sessions wrote in a letter that the judge should be rejected because he issued a ruling that “prohibited prayers in the Indiana House of Representatives that expressly mentioned Jesus Christ…yet he allowed prayers which mentioned Allah,” according to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. He also said Judge Hamilton “succeeded in blocking the enforcement of an Indiana informed consent law (for women trying to obtain an abortion) for seven years.”

Indiana’s Lugar, however, said in a speech that Sessions was wrong on each point, and that the Alabaman had misstated Judge Hamilton’s ruling on prayer. He called the nominee “superbly qualified.” To learn more about the debate over Judge Hamilton, check out these earlier Gavel Grab posts. You can also read articles about Obama’s pace in filling federal judgeships here, and about the increasingly partisan tone of federal judicial nomination battles from Justice at Stake’s Web site here.