By Nate Raymond
Dec 9 (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Tuesday confirmed two conservative Mississippi Supreme Court justices to serve as federal trial court judges, despite what Democrats called their extreme stances on abortion, LGBTQ rights and sentencing.
The Republican-led chamber approved President Donald Trump’s nominees, Robert Chamberlin and James Maxwell, to serve as life-tenured judges on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi.
The Senate voted 51-46 in favor of Chamberlin, who has served on his state’s high court since 2017, and 51-46 in favor of Maxwell, who joined the nine-member Mississippi Supreme Court in 2016.
Trump announced their nominations in August, describing Chamberlin in a social media post as a “TOUGH, SMART” individual and Maxwell as a jurist who would make his state proud “by strongly upholding the Rule of Law, and our Constitution.”
While the Republican president’s second-term judicial nominees have largely sailed smoothly through the Senate, the Mississippi justices’ nominations were held up for weeks by a lone member of Trump’s own party, U.S. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
Tillis, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said he held up votes to pressure Mississippi’s senior Republican senator, Roger Wicker, into helping an indigenous group in North Carolina gain federal tribal recognition.
Wicker chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Tillis, who has said he will not run for re-election, is seeking to have federal recognition of the Lumbee tribe included in the National Defense Authorization Act.
He ended his blockade on Nov. 20, allowing the panel to advance their nominations on party-line votes. Text for the annual defense policy bill released on Sunday included a provision providing Lumbee tribe recognition.
Senate Democrats and progressive advocates opposed to Chamberlin’s nomination pointed to legislation he sponsored and supported while in the Mississippi State Senate from 2000 to 2004 that were in line with socially conservative priorities.
He cosponsored a state constitutional amendment that would bar Mississippi from recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states; co-sponsored a bill redefining an embryo or fetus as a “human being”; and introduced a bill requiring “In God We Trust” to be displayed in classrooms.
Asked by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal during a Sept. 3 hearing whether they believed the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 ruling Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage was correctly decided, both nominees demurred, with Chamberlin saying it would be “improper for us to comment on that.”
Maxwell in April wrote the majority opinion for the Mississippi Supreme Court holding 8-1 that a transgender teenager could not legally change his name to conform with the teen’s gender identity. Chamberlin concurred.
Democrats also highlighted an opinion Maxwell wrote for a 9-0 court in 2020 upholding what the justice described as an “obviously harsh” 12-year-sentence for a man convicted of possessing a cell phone in jail, holding it was not “grossly disproportionate.”
Read more:
Trump’s Mississippi judge nominees advance after Republican senator ends block on vote
Trump picks five new judicial nominees in Alabama, Mississippi
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston)
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