Vice President and former Senator Mike Pence cast a tie-breaking vote to confirm a federal judge after outgoing Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) broke rank and voted against the nominee.
The Republicans hold a slim majority in the Senate, 51-49, until the New Year. After that, the margin will widen to 53-47 as the GOP won several seats during the November midterms.
Flake's vote made the total 50-50, forcing Pence to step in and cast the tie-breaking vote in his role as the ex officio President of the Senate to confirm the nomination of Harvard Law School graduate Jonathan Kobes, 44, to be a U.S. Circuit Judge for the Eighth Circuit.
The Eighth Circuit oversees cases from Arkansas, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, and Nebraska. Kobes is from South Dakota.
He's also voted to confirm Samuel Brownback as ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom and to confirm Russell Vought to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, both earlier this year.
The vote for Kobes is his first to confirm a federal judge. On Nov. 29, he voted to move the Kobes nomination forward.
But Republicans have argued that the association seems set on opposing Trump nominees.
"I see no basis for concluding that the absence of written work product means Mr. Kobes is 'not qualified.' The most that the ABA could’ve said is that they didn’t have enough information to come to a conclusion about his writing abilities."
He also noted that the association's evaluator, who he didn't name, "has a long history of liberal activism," and once sent a letter opposing the confirmation of Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court even though the ABA rated Justice Alito “Unanimously well qualified.”
She's also "retweeted tweets mocking Justice Scalia and originalist interpretations of the Constitution," Grassley said.