Overnight deal helps Tillis, Republicans block Biden's NC nominee for judge

WASHINGTON — Sen. Thom Tillis promised Majority Leader Chuck Schumer he couldn’t get the votes to push through President Joe Biden’s nomination of North Carolina Solicitor General Ryan Park to fill a judicial vacancy.

And late Wednesday night, Tillis says, Democrats struck a deal to throw out the nominations of Park and three other appellate court nominees, if Republicans would stop making other judicial Senate confirmations difficult.

Republicans took the deal, Tillis said.

That would mean President-elect Donald Trump gets to choose who replaces retiring Judge James Wynn on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.

And Tillis warned Wynn and his colleagues not to try any funny business in the meantime.

“I expect that judges who submitted their retirements will not play partisan politics with a presidential transition and a bipartisan Senate deal going back on their word to retire,” Tillis said in a written statement. “No judges did this during the previous lame duck because the judiciary needs to be above partisan politics.”

Tillis and Sen. Ted Budd, both Republicans from North Carolina, have been vocal critics of Park since Biden announced his nomination in July.

But both senators say they tried to stop Biden from making the nomination months earlier.

“This nomination is a non-starter and the White House has already been informed they do not have the votes for confirmation,” Tillis and Budd said, in a joint statement in July. “While the White House has fallen short of engaging the advice and consent process in good faith for North Carolina’s judicial vacancies, we still hope to work together to find a consensus nominee who can earn bipartisan support and be confirmed.”

Within a month of Park’s nomination, the solicitor general sat through a heated judiciary committee hearing listening to Tillis tell his colleagues that he believed Park was a partisan candidate, something Park denied.

Then, last week, Park’s nomination came up for a vote before that same committee.

Tillis blasted the White House counsel as being “absolutely incompetent” before the vote took place. He added that one of the people the White House considered for the job was former N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, who ran against Budd in his 2022 Senate campaign.

He warned his colleagues that if they took this vote and helped push through Park’s nomination, he would stop working across the aisle to help them block nominations they didn’t like. And he warned that Republicans are about to have control of both chambers and the executive office.

He fumed when they did it anyway.

Tillis left the committee hearing still angered by what had just taken place.

He reiterated to reporters waiting for him in the hallway that Schumer could not get enough support on the Senate floor for Park’s nomination to succeed. But Tillis refused to say which senators would vote with him. He said that would only help Schumer’s strategy.

Tillis said what he did next, and how he worked with Democrats, depended on what Schumer did on the floor.

“I will be instructed by Schumer’s behavior, “ Tillis said. “Going forward, he gets to choose, and so do all the Judiciary Committee members who just enabled him with that vote. Elections and votes have consequences, and they’re about to see the consequences on this.”

Tillis did not say Thursday what this agreement meant to his future actions.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.