A lengthy nomination process, the patchy U.S. Senate calendar and the powerful gravity of campaign season mean that Karla Campbell may just barely make it across the finish line. Campbell, a Nashville attorney with elite credentials and expertise in employment and labor law, will likely be Biden’s fifth addition to the powerful U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which takes federal cases from Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan.
Nominated in late May — six months before November’s presidential contest and nine months before a new Congress could potentially boot Democrats out of power in the Senate — Campbell began the long, slow trudge to a federal judgeship with a June appearance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In brief spurts, senators from both parties question a nominee before a committee vote on whether to send them to the upper chamber for confirmation. It was here that Campbell, like many accomplished Tennesseans before her, drifted into Marsha Blackburn’s crosshairs.
“This one was particularly nasty,” Carl Tobias tells the Scene. Tobias is a law professor at the University of Richmond who studies the federal judicial process. “I felt for the nominees. It was all guilt by association. A lot of it is theater — some of it will be posted on YouTube.”
Tobias makes the point that, especially in an election year, these hearings become playgrounds for senators to take shots at the opposing party and the president. He expects the actual confirmations to pass easily with full support from Democrats.
Without the votes to block a nominee via the legislative process, Republican pugilists like Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina lead personal attacks with whatever material their offices dig up. At Campbell’s hearing, that material included her work in the early 2010s with Nashville nonprofit Workers’ Dignity/Dignidad Obrera and tweets from Odessa Kelly, a congressional candidate who received a campaign donation from Campbell.
Judiciary hearing in D.C. puts Nashville labor attorney Karla Campbell through the partisan buzzsaw
Blackburn, who rose to power as an anti-establishment Tennessee state senator in the late ’90s and early 2000s, fits comfortably among this Senate clique. It’s a stark contrast with colleagues like Chuck Grassley, Iowa’s 90-year-old senior senator, who appears to possess neither the vitriol nor the energy to cross-examine a reasonably polite fellow American in bad faith.
In early 2022, Blackburn led attacks on Andre Mathis, a Black attorney from Memphis nominated to the 6th Circuit, for unpaid traffic tickets that had led to a suspended license more than a decade earlier. In committee, Blackburn referred to the tickets as Mathis’ “rap sheet.”
“I simply forgot about it,” Mathis told senators, who pushed him to recount a timeline of citations, reminders, payment and the license reinstatement process. “I regret that I did those things. I can assure the committee that I’m a law-abiding citizen. I’ve never been arrested, I’ve never been charged with a crime. I sincerely regret my actions there.”
Democrats, led by committee chair Dick Durbin of Illinois, dull Blackburn’s sting by redirecting discussion to nominees’ extensive résumés and professional experience. They follow attacks with apologies, casting Republican colleagues’ behavior as petty and embarrassing. Crucially, Democrats have the votes to approve nominees to the bench. They sometimes even pick up Republican support, as was the case for Mathis, who won favor from Louisiana’s Sen. John Kennedy.
“The criminal record that they talked about, that he forgot to face some traffic tickets, when they contacted him about it through a warrant, he just said, ‘It’s true, I forgot to pay them,’ and he paid up, but I just didn’t think that was disqualifying,” Kennedy told reporters at the time.
Blackburn’s other major fuel source has been accusing the Biden administration of shutting her and her fellow Tennessee Republican, Sen. Bill Hagerty, out of the nomination process.
“There was a backroom deal to appoint Mr. Ritz to this vacancy from the very start,” Blackburn told colleagues during the April 17 committee hearing for Kevin Ritz, a U.S. attorney nominated to the 6th Circuit. “The most glaring example of the White House outright refusal to consult is the fact that they have not even bothered to ask what our objections to Mr. Ritz might be.”
A year earlier, Blackburn and Hagerty had returned blue slips supporting Ritz’s nomination to be U.S. attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, a post he currently holds. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved his nomination in May along party lines. Ritz’s confirmation awaits a full vote on the Senate floor.
Blackburn skewered Biden for ignoring the blue slip process — a century-old tradition in which presidents prize approval from judicial nominees’ home-state senators. Years ago, senators returned (or withheld) assessments of nominees via blue paper forms. Durbin responded that Hagerty and Blackburn had refused the opportunity extended by Biden to participate in nominee selection; he also pointed out that Republicans had scrapped blue slips for circuit court judges during the Trump administration.
Blackburn renewed the accusations directed at the Biden administration for, she said, cutting her office out of the search that produced Campbell.
“I want to take this opportunity to extend my thanks to my home-state senators,” Campbell said in her introductory remarks. Campbell grew up in Knoxville and currently works at Nashville firm Stranch, Jennings & Garvey. “Sen. Blackburn, Sen. Hagerty — my mom’s death came in the middle of interviews with your staff for this position, and the folks in your office treated me with incredible empathy, sending condolences and kind notes. I have carried these notes with me the past few months, and they remind me how lucky I am to be a Tennessean.”
Requests for comment sent to Blackburn’s office were not returned by press time.
