Knives are out for the vice president-elect as JD Vance’s fellow Republican senators trash him for skipping out on confirmation votes for President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees.
Even though Republicans are currently in the Senate minority, the party is trying to block Biden’s nominees by slowing down the confirmation process in order to run out the clock and keep Biden from filling vacancies on the federal bench.
As of Tuesday, the Senate has confirmed 217 of Biden’s picks, with 44 vacancies, according to CBS News. If Biden fills them all, he’ll have gotten more judges onto the federal bench than Donald Trump did in his first term in office.
But Vance, along with a handful of other Senate Republicans, have been absent from the chamber, leaving the GOP without a sufficient number of votes to achieve their goal of slow-rolling the process and blocking confirmations.
“If we don’t show up, we lose,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told The Hill. “I don’t care what the reasons were. We have fewer than 15 scheduled legislative days. You have to show up. Period. End of story. There’s nothing more important.”
“This leftist judge would have been voted down and the seat on the important 11th circuit would have been filled by Donald Trump next year had Republicans showed up,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote in a post on X, referring to Monday’s confirmation of Embry J. Kidd. “Now, the leftist judge will have a lifetime appointment and the people of FL, AL and GA will suffer the consequences.”
On Tuesday, even Trump seemingly lashed out at Vance and other Republicans who didn’t show. (Of course, at least two Republican senators were with Trump at a rocket launch for pal Elon Musk’s company.)
“The Democrats are trying to stack the Courts with Radical Left Judges on their way out the door. Republican Senators need to Show Up and Hold the Line — No more Judges confirmed before Inauguration Day!” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform.
As an excuse for why he didn’t make it to the vote, Vance said he was interviewing FBI director candidates. (However, the current FBI director’s term doesn’t end until 2027, so replacing him would require Trump to fire the current director.) Vance made the excuse in a since-deleted X post, in which he lashed out at Grace Chong—an ally of Trump ally Steve Bannon—after Chong criticized Vance for not showing up for votes.
“Grace Chong is a mouth breathing imbecile who attacks those of us in the fight rather than make herself useful,” Vance wrote in a post on X. “I tend to think it’s more important to get an FBI director who will dismantle the deep state than it is for Republicans to lose a vote 49-46 rather than 49-45. But that’s just me.”
But that excuse wasn’t good enough for The Wall Street Journal’s right-wing editorial board, which wrote, “Nice to hear he’s on the job that begins in January, which is two months away. But a few good GOP excuses can mean a lifetime on the bench. Republican Senators have a duty in the lame duck to show up for these votes. Any judicial vacancy that goes unfilled now will be Mr. Trump’s to nominate someone to fill.”
Vance, for his part, has missed almost every Senate vote since Trump chose him as his vice presidential running mate this summer.
Ultimately, Republicans are mad at Vance at quite an inopportune time.
Vance is on Capitol Hill on Wednesday serving as a sherpa of sorts for infamous creep Matt Gaetz, whom Trump nominated to be attorney general. Senators are not cool with Gaetz’s nomination as he faces allegations of sex trafficking that would make any decent human’s skin crawl.
Interesting that Vance can make it to Capitol Hill to shill for an accused sexual predator, but not to do his actual job that he is paid $174,000 a year of taxpayer money to do.
Of course, we really aren’t complaining that Vance is absent. One less obstructionist seeking to hamstring Biden isn’t a problem for us.
