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Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, was
confirmed on a nearly party-line 50-49 vote. Sen. Joe Manchin of
West Virginia was the lone Democrat who voted against the
nomination, citing "prior inflammatory statements" by Ho.
Ho faced intense resistance from Republicans over his past
social media posts critical of the party's senators and
conservative policies, which they said cast doubt on his fitness
to serve as a federal judge.
Ho apologized during a 2021 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing
for using “overheated rhetoric” on social media, including
criticizing Sen. Mike Lee of Utah for tweets arguing that
safeguarding personal liberty was a more important objective
than ensuring democracy.
Ho broadly defended his past advocacy and vowed to serve "as a
fair, neutral, impartial arbiter of the law.” Progressives
touted Ho as a civil rights champion.
While at the ACLU, Ho challenged Republican-backed voting
restrictions and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in a case
that blocked the Trump administration from including a
citizenship question on the 2020 U.S. Census.
Ho is Biden’s fifth confirmed judicial nominee for the U.S.
District Court for the Southern District of New York and will be
the second active Asian American judge on the court.
Biden has sought to increase racial and ethnic diversity on the
U.S. judiciary and appoint judges from varied professional
backgrounds such as public defenders and civil rights lawyers.
"Under previous administrations, lawyers who spent their careers
at civil rights organizations were too often passed over when it
came time to pick judges," Brian Fallon, executive director of
the progressive group Demand Justice said Wednesday. "Not so
anymore."
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by David Bario and
Alistair Bell)
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