Apparently McConnell gave up

I guess Mitch never brought Thomas Farr's nomination for a district court position to vote. He just let the matter drop, since it became known that he wouldn't have enough votes.   But only because of one lone (black) Republican senator. 

Thomas Farr update

He may never even get a final vote.

[Tim Scott, R-SC] will oppose Thomas Farr to be a District Court judge, effectively killing the nomination on the Senate floor. It's the second judge the Senate's lone African-American GOP senator has tanked this year over their views and actions on race.

In a statement on Thursday afternoon, Scott cited "lingering concerns about issues that could affect [Farr's] decision-making process as a federal judge" in opposing Farr. It was a reference to Farr's alleged connection to former Sen. Jesse Helms' intimidation campaigns against black voters.

[...]

After voting to advance Farr's nomination on Wednesday, Scott, Rubio and Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) began re-examining the nomination following the Washington Post's publication of a Justice Department memo detailing Farr's connection to Helms's campaigns. Helms’ campaign sent postcards targeting African-American voters that suggested they were not eligible to vote. Farr was a lawyer for the campaign at the time.

[...]

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) also opposed the nomination, though it was part of his stand against all judicial nominees in order to force a vote on a bill to protect special counsel Robert Mueller. And all Democrats came out early against the nomination, as they were trying desperately to sway Scott and other squeamish Republicans to block Farr's lifetime appointment over his voting rights record.

[...]

Rubio and Collins had already endorsed Farr earlier in the week, but there were signs that his nomination was in jeopardy earlier Thursday, when the Senate delayed a final vote on the judge to next week. In addition to Scott, Murkowski and Collins said that they were undecided Thursday, even after Murkowski's office said she did not intend to block the nominee.

[...]

All three senators voted to move forward with the nomination Wednesday during a procedural vote. But Scott showed signs of hesitation, voting an hour after the scheduled time and sounding increasingly dour in his comments.

[...]

"The Senate does not have the votes to confirm Farr, and hopefully it never will," said Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP. "He should never be confirmed."

Donald Trump and Rod Rosenstein Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) office referred questions about whether the vote on Farr will still occur next week to the White House, which did not immediately comment.

  Politico

I'm guessing Mitch will not bring it to a vote if he knows he doesn't have enough to win.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Farr to go forward

No surprise here.

The Senate on Wednesday inched closer to confirming Thomas Farr to be a lifetime federal judge, despite strong opposition from civil rights groups and Democrats over his long career of trying to weaken black voters’ rights.

The Senate voted 50-50 on a procedural step to advance Farr’s nomination to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Vice President Mike Pence came in to break the tie. Every Democrat voted against Farr, as did Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who is opposing all of President Donald Trump’s nominees until he gets a vote on a bill to protect special counsel Robert Mueller.

Farr’s final confirmation vote is expected later this week.

  HuffPo

What a pathetic bunch of racists the Senate GOP are.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Packing the courts: Farr - Part 2

Last year, President Donald Trump nominated Thomas Farr, a Republican lawyer based in Raleigh, to be a federal judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina, which spans 44 counties from Raleigh to the Atlantic coast. He has a long history of representing the state against voting rights groups accusing it of discrimination against voters of color. In 2013, North Carolina’s GOP-controlled Legislature hired Farr to defend a sweeping set of voting restrictions that a federal appeals court ultimately struck down for targeting black voters “with almost surgical precision.” The North Carolina Legislature also hired Farr to defend redistricting maps for Congress and the state Legislature that have since been invalidated in court, with one federal panel calling the state legislative districts “among the largest racial gerrymanders ever encountered by a federal court.”

[...]

The seat on the US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina has been vacant since the end of 2005, the longest judicial vacancy in the country. President Barack Obama nominated two African Americans to fill the seat, but they were blocked by Republican senators. Though the Eastern District is more than a quarter African American, there has never been a black judge there.

  Mother Jones

It seems particularly heinous - i.e. Trump era Republican - to bring his nomination to a vote at this point, just after midterms that were awash in the South with voter suppression.

In 1984 and 1990, Farr served as campaign lawyer for Helms, whom the Washington Post‘s David Broder called “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.” In 1990, when Helms faced off against former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, the city’s first black mayor, the North Carolina Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to predominantly African American households falsely telling them it was a crime to vote if they moved within 30 days of the election, with a punishment of up to five years in jail.

The Justice Department sued the Helms campaign, saying the postcards were designed “to intimidate and/or threaten black voters in an effort to deter such voters from exercising their right to vote.”

[...]

In response to a written questionnaire, Farr denied any involvement in the mailings or knowledge of them until he was contacted by the Justice Department. He said he “was appalled to read the incorrect language printed on the card and to then discover it had been sent to African Americans.”

But notes kept by Gerald Hebert, who served as deputy chief of the voting section at the Justice Department in the 1990s, show that Farr participated in a meeting with Helms campaign officials in October 1990 to discuss “ballot security” efforts and advised the campaign on what to do. “Farr also denied he had ‘any role in the drafting or sending of the postcards,’” Hebert told HuffPost. “But he did discuss the issue of sending the postcards three weeks before they were sent. I would describe that as playing some ‘role.’ He also denied flat-out that he did not ‘participate in any meetings in which the postcards were discussed before they were sent.’"

[...]

Senate Democrats believe the vote will be close. Schumer said that every Senate Democrat opposes Farr’s nomination. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) has vowed to oppose all of Trump’s judicial nominations until the Senate votes on his bill to protect the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, so only one more Republican senator would need to defect in order to sink Farr’s nomination.

Good luck finding another GOP Senator willing to do that.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Packing the courts

They won't get it.

Comes now another test for Ben Sasse, and Susan Collins, and all the other Republicans who are terribly dismayed over the vandal in the White House, and what he is doing to our precious national dialogue and to our democratic institutions. How's about you all get together and fight like hell to keep this gombeen off the federal bench. It's bad enough that Mitch McConnell has made it his life's work to salt the federal judiciary with larval Scalias, but this guy, Thomas Farr, whose entire career has been as a kept Republican lawyer, and who was primarily responsible for a voter-suppression plan that a court said targeted minority voters "with almost surgical precision," should really be a hack too far, shouldn't he?

[...]

As is the case with Chief Justice John Roberts, Farr has been on the voter-suppression train for his entire public career.

[...]

See, Ben? Sue? This is an easy one. You can vote no on this guy. (If that stalls a whole battalion of these guys, well, that's just the way it goes.) You can demonstrate your commitment to bipartisanship by making McConnell pick some other product of the Federalist Society greenhouse who doesn't have the noxious track record that Farr has. Then Ben can go back to lecturing us on community, and Susan can go back to furrowing her brow over whatever the next atrocity she will have to vote for will be.

  Charles P Pierce

If we're still looking for help from Susan Collins, we deserve to be let down.

And Ben Sasse?

Politico reported a year ago that Sasse, who voted last January to advance Farr's nomination out of committee, had responded to the American Bar Association's having rated several members of this clutch of nominees "unqualified" by questioning the ABA's bona fides.

Exactly.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.