Today the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing for Ryan Y. Park, who was nominated by President Biden to the Fourth Circuit on July 8. Park has been the solicitor general of North Carolina since 2020 after previously serving as the state’s deputy solicitor general. Prior to that, he worked as an associate at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP and in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the State Department. At the start of his legal career, he clerked at the district and circuit court levels before clerking for both Justice David Souter (retired) and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Park has taken one of the best paths to a judicial nomination by President Biden: Being a radical left-wing activist who argues the losing side of a recent Supreme Court case the Left loathes. Park argued Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina before the Supreme Court, which, together with the related challenge to Harvard, barred racial preferences in university admissions. Compare Park’s loss in that case to Julie Rikelman’s loss arguing Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022. Biden subsequently appointed her to the First Circuit.
Senator Thom Tillis is a Republican known for his bipartisanship, but he has been on the warpath against this nomination, and rightly so. He showed during the hearing a video with clips of Park expressing his satisfaction “as a progressive lawyer who wanted to make a difference” to be “working for a new progressive attorney general,” Josh Stein. The video called attention to North Carolina’s track record on immigration policy under Stein and Park, which was nothing short of scandalous. Advancing Stein’s priorities, Park fought the Trump administration on immigration policy. And contrary to Stein’s insistence that “there are no sanctuary cities in North Carolina,” nearly 500 illegal immigrants—a number of them charged with violent crimes like rape and murder—were released from jails over the course of ten months in 2018–2019 after law enforcement refused to comply with detainer requests made by ICE. Park stated that his boss had been elected by the people of North Carolina, and “I feel privileged to be able to advise him.” He described himself as “the tip of the spear to try to effectuate the policy judgments and the positions” held by Stein.
Park also defended Governor Roy Cooper’s executive order during Covid limiting worship services in church to ten people. By its convoluted operation, the governor’s Covid restrictions did not apply the ten-person limit to grocery stores, shopping centers, libraries, transit stations, and medical facilities—or, for that matter, to “Wal-Mart, Lowes, and countless other businesses of all kinds” as the district court pointed out. Or to funerals, religious or non-religious, which were subject to a 50-person limit. Park lost as the court issued a temporary restraining order. Senator Josh Hawley grilled the nominee on this issue and quoted from the court’s decision: “The Governor cannot treat religious worship as a world apart from non-religious activities with no good, or more importantly, constitutional, explanation.” Park stated that “I had a brief involvement in that case,” but he was in fact the attorney of record.
For good measure, when Justice Ginsburg made a succession of statements criticizing then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016, Park defended her as breaching no ethical norm and not being required to recuse herself from any future case involving him. (Recall that Ginsburg apologized for her comments but would not recuse in any Trump cases, not even the case involving a congressional subpoena for Trump’s tax returns—despite one of her criticisms specifying his refusal to release those returns.) While Park conceded that “justices should rarely voice their political opinions on a particular candidate or election,” his conclusion was obsequious: “But when a justice does decide to speak, we should listen.” Park’s defense of the most political justice of recent times is howlingly inconsistent with the Democrats’ pseudo-ethics outrage targeting today’s conservative justices and their corresponding proposals to destroy the Court’s independence.
Senator Tillis was joined by Park’s other home state senator, Ted Budd, in a joint statement that asserted of Park, “This nomination is a non-starter and the White House has already been informed they do not have the votes for confirmation. While the White House has fallen short of engaging the advice and consent process in good faith for North Carolina’s judicial vacancies, we still hope to work together to find a consensus nominee who can earn bipartisan support and be confirmed.” It has not been made public which Democrats are opposed to this nomination, but during the hearing, Tillis said that it was already clear that Park lacked the votes for confirmation and that he had conveyed that to the White House months ago. Hopefully that opposition will hold. President Biden has done enough damage to the federal bench as it is, and we do not need another activist occupying an appellate seat.