Senate Judiciary Committee advances 10th Circuit nominee to replace Gorsuch on party-line vote
Colorado Supreme Court Justice Allison Eid. Photo from Colorado Judicial Branch.
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday advanced the nomination of Colorado Supreme Court Justice Allison Eid to fill Justice Neil Gorsuch’s seat on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The committee voted 11-9, along party lines, to advance Eid’s nomination and the nomination of University of Pennsylvania law professor Stephanos Bibas to the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, report Courthouse News Service, the Washington Examiner, the Denver Post and the Volokh Conspiracy.
Eid was on President Donald Trump’s shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees.
Eid and Bibas are among eight nominees approved on Thursday. The count is the highest number the panel has sent to the Senate in a single day since President Donald Trump took office, according to Courthouse News Service.
At her nomination hearing in September, Eid was asked about a dissent she wrote in which she argued a cellphone left in a convenience store bathroom had been abandoned and subject to a warrantless search, the Denver Post reported at the time.
The cellphone owner had accidentally locked the phone in the bathroom and asked a clerk to let him back in, but the clerk told the phone owner to come back later. The clerk later turned the phone over to police, who read text messages and charged the phone owner with drug offenses.
On Thursday, Eid was questioned about another opinion in which she argued juveniles sentenced to life without parole should not receive retroactive relief under a 2012 Supreme Court decision that held such sentences are unconstitutional.
Bibas was questioned about an unpublished paper he wrote in 2009 advocating the use of “non-disfiguring corporal punishment” for some types of crimes, according to Courthouse News. Bibas said in written responses that he didn’t publish the paper after he realized it was “wrong and deeply offensive.”
