WASHINGTON — Sen. Alan Armstrong of Oklahoma has pulled his support for one of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, a reversal that clouds the pick’s path in the Senate during the lame-duck session, according to Reuters.
A spokesperson for Armstrong confirmed on Wednesday that the senator now opposes the nomination of Zach West, a lawyer in the Oklahoma attorney general’s office. Trump announced in August that he was nominating West to serve as a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma.
West had already appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was poised to go up for a vote before the panel on Tuesday, a step that would have allowed his nomination to advance to the full Senate.
The committee put that vote off instead. Opposition had emerged from Armstrong, who had previously returned a so-called blue slip to the committee indicating his support for West.
Why the vote is stuck
West needs all 12 Republican votes in committee to advance. Outgoing Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a member of the panel, has indicated he supports Armstrong’s position, a person familiar with the nominations process said, and that decision effectively blocks the nomination from moving forward at this time.
Representatives for Tillis, West and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Armstrong arrived in the Senate as a caretaker pick. Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed him in March to serve for a seat vacated after Markwayne Mullin resigned to become Trump’s homeland security secretary, and Armstrong is in his final weeks in office.
He will be succeeded by Senator-elect Kevin Hern, who won the election to fill the seat and is to be sworn in on Nov. 30. Whether Hern would support West’s nomination was unclear, and a spokesperson for Hern, currently a member of the U.S. House, did not respond to a request for comment.
A wider lame-duck fight over judges
The setback is not the only one. Armstrong’s move marked the latest instance of Republican senators stymieing the White House’s efforts to confirm Trump’s preferred picks for judges in their home states after the Nov. 3 election.
The White House and Senate Republican leaders are racing to confirm as many new judges as possible before Democrats take control of the Senate in January, after winning at least 54 seats in the midterm elections.
A small number of Republican senators have since withheld support for nominees in their states. Late on Tuesday, the White House swapped out nominees for a key Arkansas-based seat on the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after that state’s senators withheld support for Trump’s original pick.
West has worked in the Oklahoma attorney general’s office since 2017, first as solicitor general and later as director of special litigation. Conservative legal activists have praised his work in the office, where he defended abortion restrictions and argued that Oklahoma could not bar religious schools from participating in its charter school program.