Democrats walked out of a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Thursday that advanced senior Justice Department official Emil Bove's nomination for a federal judgeship, alleging Republicans had improperly rushed the process.
A spokesperson for the top Democrat on the panel, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, said that as a result, it is an open question whether the nominations of Bove, who was President Donald Trump's personal defense lawyer, and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, whom the president has picked for U.S. attorney of the District of Columbia, are moving forward.
The spokesperson said the Republican majority broke several rules with its actions and Democrats would make their case to the Senate parliamentarian that the votes should be voided.
A spokesperson for the committee's chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said there is no dispute and both Bove's nomination to the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Pirro's nomination can move ahead to the full Senate.
The fireworks started after Grassley announced he was holding the vote on Bove's nomination even though some Democratic members of the panel had yet to speak about the nominee.
"This is out of order," Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., told Grassley, as his colleagues walked out. "This is absolutely insane. What is the rush?"
"If you want to force this through, if you want to ram this through, there's a way to do this in accordance with the rules," Booker said.
"This lacks decency. It lacks decorum. It shows you do not want to simply hear from your colleagues. This is absolutely wrong," Booker continued, and "you don't even seem to care."
"This is an abuse of power," he added, and walked out himself after he was done with his objection.
After the vote concluded, Grassley said he simply had followed a precedent from when Democrats had the majority, and he accused his Democratic colleagues of "obstruction."
"This is not unprecedented, either the actions of the minority walking away or what we did here as a majority," Grassley said. "It’s happened before, and we have to move things along."
Booker said afterward that the earlier incident Grassley was referring to was different and involved a process that would have delayed a vote for hours.
"This is the pre-emptive cutting off of debate because they didn’t want to hear the truth, they didn’t want to hear the truth about a nominee," Booker said, referring to the committee Republicans' actions.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., complained that Republicans had already refused to allow testimony from a whistleblower who had told the senators that Bove had said to him and other Justice Department officials that they might have to defy court orders to implement Trump's mass deportation agenda.
"I haven’t seen anything like it in 15 years in the United States Senate, just overriding roughshod the rules of the committee to silence members in this way on nominees for lifetime appointments on the federal court who are unfit and unqualified," Blumenthal said.
"We can disagree about whether they should be on the court, but not about the rules that put them there."
