WASHINGTON -- Brett Talley, the president's nominee to be a federal judge in Alabama, has never tried a case, was unanimously rated "not qualified" by the American Bar Association's judicial rating committee, has practiced law for only three years and, as a blogger last year, displayed a degree of partisanship unusual for a judicial nominee, denouncing "Hillary Rotten Clinton" and pledging support for the National Rifle Association.
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, on a party-line vote, approved him for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. His nomination now moves to the Senate floor.
Talley, 36, is part of what President Donald Trump has called the "untold story" of his success in filling the courts with young conservatives.
"The judge story is an untold story. Nobody wants to talk about it," Trump said last month, standing alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in the White House Rose Garden. "But when you think of it, Mitch and I were saying, that has consequences 40 years out, depending on the age of the judge -- but 40 years out."
[PRESIDENT TRUMP: Timeline, appointments, executive orders + guide to actions in first 200 days]
Civil-rights groups and liberal advocates see the matter differently. They denounced Thursday's vote, calling it "laughable" that none of the committee Republicans objected to confirming a lawyer with as little experience as Talley to preside over federal trials.
"He's practiced law for less than three years and never argued a motion, let alone brought a case. This is the least amount of experience I've seen in a judicial nominee," said Kristine Lucius, executive vice president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
The group was one of several on the left that urged the Judiciary Committee to reject Talley because of his lack of qualifications and because of doubts over whether he had the "temperament and ability to approach cases with the fairness and open-mindedness necessary to serve as a federal judge."
Talley grew up in Alabama and earned degrees from the University of Alabama and Harvard Law School. He was a clerk for two federal judges and worked as a speech writer on the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney. And, like many people who eventually become federal judges, he became the protege of someone who became a senator.
In Talley's case, the mentor was Republican Sen. Luther Strange, the former Alabama attorney general who was appointed to the Senate in January to replace Jeff Sessions, who left the Senate to become U.S. attorney general. Talley worked for Strange as a deputy.
Typically, senators play the lead role in recommending nominees for the federal district judgeships in their state. Talley also had something of an inside track. This year, when Sessions moved to the attorney general post, Talley took a job in the Justice Department office that selects judicial nominees.
Trump and McConnell have succeeded in pushing judicial nominees through the Senate because Republicans have voted in lockstep since taking control of the chamber in 2014.
When Trump took office in January, there were more than 100 vacant seats on the federal courts, thanks to an unprecedented slowdown engineered by McConnell during the final two years of President Barack Obama's term. The Senate under GOP control approved only 22 judges in that two-year period, the lowest total since 1951-52, in the last year of President Harry Truman's term. By contrast, the Senate under Democratic control approved 68 judges in the last two years of George W. Bush's presidency.
The best known vacancy was on the Supreme Court. After Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell refused to permit a hearing for Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama's nominee. Trump filled the seat earlier this year with Justice Neil Gorsuch.
A Section on 11/11/2017