WASHINGTON _ Thomas Farr moved one step closer to final confirmation to become a district judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina. With Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote, the Senate agreed to limit debate on Farr's nomination, setting up a final vote Thursday.
President Donald Trump nominated the 64-year-old Farr to be a U.S. District Court Judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina in 2017 and again earlier this year. Though Farr, a Raleigh, N.C., attorney, cleared a Senate committee in January, his nomination has languished in the Senate _ as Democrats and civil rights groups hammered him as hostile to voting rights for blacks.
All 49 senators in the Democratic caucus, which includes two independents, voted against moving Farr's nomination forward. Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, also voted against the nomination, citing the refusal of the Senate to take up a bill aimed at protecting special counsel Robert Mueller. But the Senate's other 50 Republicans all voted to advance Farr to a final confirmation vote.
That vote is expected Thursday.
Sen. Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, was the last to vote, after a long wait.
Senators do not have to vote the same way on final confirmation. Scott voted to advance another Trump judicial nominee this summer, but then opted not to vote for his confirmation over racially insensitive writings, a move that sunk Ryan Bounds' nomination to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus asked Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, to do the same to Farr's nomination.
"I can't imagine that if he opposed the 9th Circuit nomination that he could possibly vote for this nominee," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., said on a Tuesday conference call.
Farr, rated "well-qualified" by the American Bar Association, is an accomplished labor lawyer. But his work for Sen. Jesse Helms during his 1990 re-election campaign against Harvey Gantt, as well as his recent work defending North Carolina Republicans in lawsuits against voter ID and gerrymandering, drew the ire of Democrats and civil rights groups.
Helms' 1990 campaign included voter intimidation tactics aimed at black voters, notably sending postcards to voters warning of arrest at the polls. Farr said he had no knowledge of the postcards before they were sent.
Gantt, a former mayor of Charlotte who ran unsuccessfully against Helms for Senate in 1990 and 1996, said Farr's work with the Helms campaign should be disqualifying.
"Federal district courts in North Carolina should have judges who are fair, impartial, and committed to equal justice under law. Thomas Farr's role in interfering with the voting rights of Black North Carolinians represents a stain on his record from which he cannot recover," Gantt said in a statement released Wednesday morning.
A panel of federal judges said in 2016 that the voter ID law passed by Republicans targeted African-American voters with "almost surgical precision."
Farr has "a long, unbroken record that dates 25 years of actively targeting black disenfranchisement," Norton said. "There are so many examples that make him unqualified."
