WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans handed President Donald Trump a win on Tuesday by confirming one of his first judicial nominees, Josh Divine, an archconservative from Missouri. But they had help from a surprising source: Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with Democrats.
Divine, 35, will now hold a lifetime seat on a U.S. district court in Missouri. He drew strong opposition from Democrats and civil rights groups over his long record of litigation against women’s reproductive rights, including leading a major challenge to the FDA’s decades-long approval of mifepristone, aka the abortion pill.
In 2010, Divine also argued in favor of bringing back literacy tests for voting, a practice banned in the 1960s for being racially discriminatory.
It’s not clear why King supported him. The independent senator supports abortion rights and voting rights, and doesn’t typically buck Democratic leadership on judicial nominations. His office declined comment.
But it appears that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who used to be Divine’s boss, simply persuaded King to vote for his former chief counsel as the vote was underway on the Senate floor.
CSPAN footage shows King walking up to Hawley and having a friendly conversation with him during Divine’s vote in the Senate. And King told a Law360 reporter on Wednesday that he did talk to Hawley about Divine, and that the Missouri senator “convinced me that he would be a capable judge.”
King’s vote has infuriated and confused at least some progressive groups.
“To say Senator King’s vote on the nomination of Joshua Divine is a shock would be a massive understatement,” Maggie Jo Buchanan, interim director of Demand Justice, said in a statement. “Any person who believes in the critical importance of reproductive rights would not vote to put an anti-abortion extremist in a lifetime position on the federal bench. The Senator owes his constituents an explanation — whatever that may be.”
What’s weirder is that, days ago, King voted against a procedural step for advancing Divine’s nomination. What could Hawley have possibly said to get King on board with a judicial nominee who represents so much of what King has fought against?
The Maine senator is a proud supporter of abortion rights. He railed against the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, and specifically tied it to “the clear, decades-long conservative campaign to fill our…
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