Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday withdrew Ryan Bounds, who had been nominated for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, after Republican Senator Tim Scott objected to articles from Bounds’s university days.
One of Trump’s nominees for the circuit court, Ryan Bounds, was just withdrawn just before the Full Senate vote after @SenatorTimScott objected to some of Bounds’ college writings regard race (see screenshot). @marcorubio joined Scott in his opposition, thus nom was going down. pic.twitter.com/tZPcinfI8E
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) July 19, 2018
As a student at Stanford University, Bounds wrote that multicultural organizations and on-campus activism “divide up by race for their feel-good ethnic hoedowns,” act as a “pestilence” that “threatens to corrupt our scholastic experience,” and “contribute more to restricting consciousness, aggravating intolerance, and pigeonholing cultural identities than many a Nazi bookburning.” He also argued against expelling students accused of sexual assault, claiming that the punishment is “probably not going to contribute a great deal toward a rape victim’s recovery.”
Bounds, a prosecutor in Portland, Oregon, was nominated back on September 7. Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, ignoring the “blue slip” process, went ahead with confirmation hearings over the objections of Bounds’s home-state senators, Democrats Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden. After Senate debate on Bounds’s nomination concluded yesterday, the Willamette Week reported that he was “likely to win the confirmation.”