Lawmakers, professors and legal advocates nationwide are in an uproar over the Senate’s confirmation of longtime Trump ally Emil Bove to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
Bove, a former member of Donald Trump’s legal defense team, was facing intense scrutiny and serious allegations from multiple Department of Justice whistleblowers. In a representative complaint from June, DOJ whistleblower Erez Reuveni stated that Bove had instructed lawyers to defy the orders of courts, claiming Bove said “that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f**k you.’” He was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 50-49, entirely via Republican “yea” votes.
The move was immediately decried by congressional Democrats.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called Bove “a Trumpian henchman — the extreme of the extreme of the extreme.”
“Shame on you,” Schumer told Republicans. “This is a dark, dark day.”
Senator Cory Booker, D-N.J., called out his Republican colleagues on X, saying they “failed their constitutional duties and put loyalty to Donald Trump over the good of our country.”
“Today is a sad day for our judicial system,” Booker said.
Anthony Michael Kreis, a political scientist and constitutional law professor at Georgia State University College of Law, called for “impeachment proceedings” against Bove should the Democrats take control of Congress.
“If Democrats ever secure the House and 2/3 of the Senate, impeachment proceedings should commence immediately,” Kreis wrote in a post on Bluesky.
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Janai Nelson, president and director counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, criticized Bove for his “blind loyalty to egregiously malicious administration.”
“Those who openly and contemptuously insult our judicial system should not be rewarded with a lifetime appointment to the bench,” Nelson said in a statement. She called the nomination an “unjust compensation for a willingness to shred the Constitution,” describing Bove as “the most unfit nomination for the U.S. Court of Appeals that the Senate has ever considered.”
Among Bove’s advocates was Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who took to CNN to defend him. Kennedy, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, blamed Democrats for “(trotting) out whistleblowers, two or three at a time” for “a nominee they don’t agree with.”
“If everyone is a racist, no one’s a racist,” Kennedy said. “If everyone’s corrupt, then no one is corrupt.”
