Legislators in Washington scrutinized four of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s nominees to the federal bench for the first time since longtime senator and Judiciary Committee member Dianne Feinstein, D-Cal., passed away.
The Senate’s judiciary panel considered five candidates for federal district courts around the nation, including U.S. magistrate Mustafa Kasubhai, nominated for the U.S. District Court in Oregon; John Kazen, nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas; and Shanlyn Park and Micah Smith, candidates to become federal judges in Hawai’i.
Kasubhai drew the most contentious comments, all from the committee’s minority Republicans. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas attacked the longtime jurist for a poem he wrote while in law school about 30 years ago.
“A number of the questions, it seems to me, were just what I would call, sort of hot button culture war kinds of issues,” Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor who closely observes the federal judiciary, told Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Based in Eugene, Kasubhai has been a federal magistrate for a decade. He was a state court judge for five years before that.
A former assistant federal public defender, partner at McCorriston Miller Mukai MacKinnon LLP in Honolulu, and associate at Hisaka Stone & Goto (now known as Hisaka Stone Goto Yoshida Cosgrove & Ching), Park was appointed to the Hawai’i circuit court on Oahu in 2021.
Smith is the deputy chief of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Honolulu. He has worked for the U.S. Department of Justice since 2012 and has also been an associate at O’Melveny & Myers LLP and a law clerk to Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Kazen has been a U.S. magistrate in Laredo, Tex. since 2018. He was a partner for more than 20 years at Kazen, Meurer, & Pérez, LLP and previously worked for Kemp, Smith, Duncan, & Hammond, PC during his legal career of more than three decades.
As of Oct. 6, Biden has nominated 179 Article III judges, including 137 to the federal district courts. One Supreme Court justice, 36 circuit judges, and 108 U.S. District court judges have been confirmed.
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