Senate Democrats Are Not Taking Their Jobs Seriously
If Trump is picking judicial nominees who will serve as “MAGA loyalists,” why are you voting to confirm any of them?
As the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, among Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s many responsibilities is sending a clear, forceful message about the party’s opposition to President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees. To date, Durbin has focused heavily on the fact that in their confirmation hearings, aspiring judges have uniformly refused to say that Trump lost the 2020 election, or to condemn the January 6 insurrection, or to do anything else that might prompt their notoriously fickle overlord to pull their nominations at the last minute.
“Have you seen the contortions that these nominees have gone through when they’re asked the basic question, ‘Who won the election in 2020?’” Durbin asked at a hearing in April. “They can’t answer it because it’s an article of faith: If you’re loyal to Trump, you never accept the premise that he lost an election.” In March, Durbin warned that Trump was looking to “stack the courts” with “MAGA loyalists who will rule in his favor.” Earlier this week, while questioning one of Trump’s former defense attorneys who is now (surprise!) up for a seat on the Second Circuit, Durbin described Trump nominees as united by their willingness to “ignore the rule of law so long as they follow his agenda.”
I am telling you all of this because, as of today, no Democratic senator has cast more votes in support of more Trump nominees than Durbin, who has voted to confirm nine of them to life-tenured judgeships. Among Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse—the caucus’s most dogged chronicler of the symbiotic relationship between the Republican Party and the conservative legal movement—is somehow right behind Durbin, with six yes votes. No other Judiciary Committee Democrat has more than three, and among them, only Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, New Jersey’s Cory Booker, and California’s Alex Padilla have yet to cast a single vote to confirm a Trump judge.
Just this week, the full Senate confirmed former federal prosecutor Sheria Clarke to a district court judgeship in South Carolina thanks in large part to eight Democrats—Durbin and Whitehouse, plus Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich, and New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan—who joined Republicans in voting yes. Like every other Trump nominee, Clarke would not denounce January 6 or acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election. As Patrick McNeil points out at Nomination Notes, had Democrats remained united, they could have (at least temporarily) blocked her confirmation. Instead, they pushed it over the top.
Earlier this month, Delaware Senator and Judiciary Committee member Chris Coons hinted that Clarke might get some Democratic support when he voted to advance her out of committee on the grounds that, as he told HuffPo, he’d found her to be a “qualified candidate.” (Oddly, after all that, Coons did not vote to confirm her on the Senate floor.) But as a general rule, lawmakers rarely discuss their rationales for supporting or opposing nominees. In October 2025, after he voted to advance five (!) district court nominees out of committee, Durbin offered perhaps the most complete public explanation for his thinking: “To take an unequivocal position that I will oppose every nominee that comes out of this administration, I think, would destroy my credibility and any opportunity for bipartisanship,” he told Bloomberg Law.
I understand that Durbin, like many Democrats of a certain vintage, still imagines the Senate as an institution that runs on bipartisan comity, and believes it is just one earnest, West Wing-esque floor speech away from becoming so once again. And strictly as a matter of counting votes, occasional Democratic support for a stray nominee doesn’t make much of a difference: Republicans control the Senate and enjoy a 12-10 edge on the Judiciary Committee, which means that as long as they stick together, they do not need Democratic support to get what they want. In this context, if you are a Democratic senator who still believes you can buy some goodwill from Republicans, perhaps a casting throwaway vote for a judge who is getting confirmed anyway feels like an acceptable price to pay.
What is less clear to me, though, is the answer to the more basic question raised by Durbin’s rhetoric: If he really believes the White House is picking nominees who will “ignore the rule of law,” why is he giving any of them his stamp of approval? What, exactly, makes a nominee whom Durbin believes will faithfully serve Trump’s “agenda” nevertheless acceptable for him to support? Durbin has said he is worried about his “credibility,” but given that he is 81 years old and retiring in eight months, I am not sure that building relationships across the aisle should be his top priority right now. If we are talking about legacies, it is hard to see how voting to confirm “MAGA loyalists” inflicts more damage than simply opposing those MAGA loyalists instead.
It is frustrating anytime elected officials who cast Trump as an existential threat to democracy show so little interest in using the power of their offices to defend it. But in 2026, when his approval rating is at 35 percent and his top two agenda items are a disastrous war in Iran and a $1.8 billion slush fund for aggrieved insurrectionists, Durbin-style timidity is both bad policy and bad politics. Voters do not want politicians who condemn Trump nominees as dangerous and unqualified, and then turn around and vote for some of them anyway. Voters want politicians who will stop the wildly unpopular president from getting more of the dangerous and unqualified nominees confirmed—or, at the very least, politicians who are willing to try.
For as much as Democratic electeds care about being perceived as reasonable consensus-builders, they never seem as concerned that everyone who is not a Washington Post editorial board member will just clock them as feckless pushovers. If you are a Democratic senator, voting to confirm the likes of Sheria Clarke does not make you look savvy or sophisticated. It just shows voters that you don’t care enough to fight.
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If a nominee is unwilling to admit that Biden won the 2020:election or that the January 6 insurrection was an illegal subversion of the electoral process, that nominee has no commitment to fact or law and has disqualified themselves from a position on the federal judiciary. Democrats who vote to advance these people re little better than the nominees themselves. Congress needs wholesale change, because between spineless Republicans and feckless Democrats, the government has been handed over to the worst people among us.
Durbin is ridiculous.