April Perry, a nominee to serve as a federal judge in the Northern District of Illinois, appears before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., on July 31, 2024. U.S. Senate/Handout via REUTERS Purchase Licensing Rights
Sept 19 (Reuters) - A U.S. Senate panel on Thursday advanced four of President Joe Biden's judicial nominees, including one whose prior nomination to become Chicago's top federal prosecutor had been blocked by Republican vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance in protest over former President Donald Trump's indictments.
The Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13-8 to send the nomination of April Perry to serve as a life-tenured judge in the Northern District of Illinois to the full Senate for its consideration.
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Perry, a former prosecutor, has since 2022 worked as the senior counsel of global investigations and fraud and abuse prevention at Chicago-headquartered GE HealthCare. Biden nominated her to the bench in April.
Biden had previously nominated her in 2023 to become the first female U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago. She has the backing of the Judiciary Committee's Democratic chair, Dick Durbin, her state's senior senator.
But her path to confirmation by the full Senate was stalled by Vance, an Ohio Republican who has placed a "hold" on various U.S. Attorney nominees that has prevented them from securing easy confirmation in the Senate.
Vance began placing a hold on Biden's nominees to the U.S. Department of Justice in June 2023 after Special Counsel Jack Smith secured the first of two federal indictments against Trump for retaining classified documents after leaving office and illegal efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden.
Vance is now Trump's running mate in the Nov. 5 presidential election, where Trump will face Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, the current vice president.
Durbin on several occasions went to the floor seeking to secure Perry's confirmation, only to have Vance object to her being confirmed by unanimous consent — the method by which the Senate has long historically confirmed U.S. Attorneys to avoid time-consuming roll call votes.
The White House then ended its bid to place Perry in that role and instead nominated her to be a judge. Vance continues to maintain a hold on four other U.S. Attorney nominees from Iowa, Massachusetts and Ohio.
Perry was one of two Illinois judicial nominees advanced by the Judiciary Committee on Thursday. The panel also voted 13-8 in favor of U.S. Magistrate Judge Jonathan Hawley serving as a district court judge in Illinois' Central District.
“Now that they have been advanced by the Committee, we will be pushing for quick consideration of their nominations by the full Senate," Durbin and Senator Tammy Duckworth, the state's other Democratic senator, said in a joint statement.
The panel also advanced the nominations of Byron Conway, a lawyer at the law firm Habush, Habush & Rottier, who if confirmed would become a judge in Wisconsin's Eastern District, and Gail Weilheimer, a state court judge in Pennsylvania nominated to be a federal judge in the state's Eastern District.
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Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston
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