Published June 23, 2026
As Judge Sparkle Sooknanan puts a stop to federal-state cooperation on purging noncitizens from the voter rolls, it has been asked, “How did Sparkle get on the bench anyway?” She was confirmed as a judge of the District Court for the District of Columbia in December 2024, during the lame-duck period of Joe Biden’s presidency. Couldn’t Republicans have stalled her for a few more weeks? The answer is no. And the backstory provides some insights into the fraught nature of lame-duck confirmations.
Following the 2024 elections, there were many judge nominations still languishing on the executive calendar of the Senate. Many of these (like Sparkle Sooknanan’s) were controversial, and Chuck Schumer couldn’t depend on his members to deliver the votes. Recall that Joe Manchin had said that he’d vote against any party-line nominee. He didn’t mean it, of course, and would conveniently deem the opposition “political” and unworthy at times when he would be the deciding vote. Regardless, Schumer had a hard time with some of these judges (judges were never his priority anyway), and so they fell to the end of the Congress.
The first fight of the lame-duck period was about Judge Embry Kidd of the Eleventh Circuit in Florida. His confirmation was a “fly-in” vote, so we knew that we wouldn’t be able to beat him. (Democratic attendance on fly-ins was always better than ours.) We also didn’t have Kyrsten Sinema, so even under normal circumstances, he’d win. However, Schumer didn’t have perfect attendance, either; John Fetterman missed the vote. This meant that, in theory, we could have won had Mike Braun, Steve Daines, Bill Hagerty, Marco Rubio, and JD Vance shown up and had Manchin stuck by his no vote.
The base went ballistic. There were some good reasons for the absences: Rubio was angling for a cabinet seat, Vance was in Mar-a-Lago helping to select said cabinet, and Braun was in Indianapolis running his gubernatorial transition. Republican voters didn’t care. In a show of judicial-confirmation interest that we in the trenches had wanted for almost four years, the GOP base lit them up and demanded their return to D.C.
Schumer, incorrectly seeing weakness in Republican attendance, attempted to file cloture on a slew of district judges in the hopes of clearing the deck before Thanksgiving and allowing his caucus to focus on circuits in December. Well, Mitch McConnell wasn’t having it, and, working with the newly elected leader John Thune, he threw all the sand possible in Schumer’s gears.
Schumer, as majority leader, got to call the tune. By custom, the majority leader decides what gets voted on. He can also keep votes open until he wins, thus obviating some attendance concerns. This is why, in the minority, all you can do is delay and make life hard for the majority, as Republicans did on the evening of November 18, 2024. In the end, though, the majority will have it’s way, and that’s why there isn’t some secret procedural trick to allow the minority to stall hated nominees indefinitely.
But there are ways to inflict pain on the majority. In order to file cloture, you need to go in and out of executive session. This is usually done by unanimous consent and is part of the usual incantations of a cloture petition. Republicans, however, objected to every such move in and out of executive and legislative session, forcing 18 roll-call votes that lasted almost until midnight.
With a 51–49 Senate and a largely nonexistent whip operation, McConnell’s and Thune’s broadside forced Schumer to contend with a constant attendance fight going forward. If Republicans continued their obstruction, forcing vote after vote, Schumer would occasionally lose in ways he couldn’t easily predict. From his perspective, he knew he had the votes (in theory) to confirm his district judges, but there were no certainties.
On the other side of the floor, you had the Republicans. We knew we had the votes, given perfect attendance, to stop three of four remaining circuit nominees. Thanks to the work of Thom Tillis, Ryan Park (Fourth Circuit) had a likely 49–51 whip count; thanks to the work of Marsha Blackburn, the same was true for Karla Campbell (Sixth Circuit). Adeel Mangi (Third Circuit) was toast: He had public opposition from Jackie Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, likely opposition from Manchin and Sinema, as well as quiet opposition from other Democrats. The remaining circuit nominee, Julia Lipez for the First Circuit in Maine, probably had the votes (although Schumer likely didn’t know this because, again, his whip operation was not reliable). At the same time, try as we might, we just couldn’t get traction against district-court nominees such as Sooknanan beyond the reliably unreliable Manchin.
So each side knew where it stood. Democrats knew they had the votes for the districts and not the circuits, as well as ball control. They also knew that, every time, they’d be taking an attendance gamble against a Republican conference spoiling for a fight. Republicans knew we had the votes for most of the circuits but not the districts and that keeping Braun, Vance, and Rubio in town indefinitely wasn’t realistic. Even in the case of Mangi, all the great work done by Lindsey Graham and other Republicans to oppose him could be washed away by a bad attendance fluke if Schumer saw an opportunity and took it.
Accordingly a deal was struck to cement the underlying political dynamics and remove uncertainty from both sides. Schumer would agree not to move the circuits, and Republicans would agree to vote just on the districts without procedural shenanigans. It would still be up to Schumer to win on attendance; again, the forces of the Senate were in his favor. Republicans traded hypothetical and unpredictable district court losses to ensure their similarly hypothetical and unpredictable circuit court wins. Indeed, we got an additional win in the process, against Lipez, whom I’m not confident we would have taken down in a fair fight. That seat, now held by Josh Dunlap, is the only conservative beachhead in the arch-liberal First Circuit.
Beyond that, we flipped the Third Circuit back (it had flipped to the Democrats when the nominally Republican Brooks Smith gave his seat to Joe Biden) and moved the Sixth Circuit to the right (Biden had replaced the liberal Republican Julia Smith Gibbons, while Trump replaced the liberal Democrat Jane Stranch). While James Wynn in the Fourth Circuit scandalously “unretired,” at least he wasn’t replaced by Ryan Park, a 41-year-old Ginsburg clerk who argued Students for Fair Admissions on behalf of the University of North Carolina.
After some final wrangling (it took Cory Booker some time to accept reality regarding Mangi), everyone agreed to the deal, and the lame duck continued rather uneventfully. I think Republicans clearly got the better of that deal, and progressive commentators went ballistic that Schumer would give us the circuits rather than “fight harder.” But attendance during a lame duck is unpredictable. That Schumer was willing to cut such a deal demonstrates this fact.
The story goes to show why, this Congress, the fewer the judges we need to confirm after the midterms, the better. And why proposals to eat up floor time (that most precious of commodities in the Senate) between now and October are fundamentally unserious and contrary to sound conservative policy. Senate Republicans have judges to confirm.
Michael A. Fragoso is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture Program, where he writes and speaks on issues relating to the law, the federal judiciary, and Congress. An attorney in private practice, he served in all three branches of the federal government, including most recently as chief counsel to the Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY). His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy: Per Curiam, and elsewhere.
