You may recall Charnelle Bjelkengren from her Senate confirmation hearings after Joe Biden nominated her for a District Court seat in Washington state. She generated all the wrong sorts of headlines when Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy asked her a couple of questions about the Constitution. When he asked her to describe Article 5 and what it does, Bjelkengren said that the article “is not coming to mind.” She seemed similarly unfamiliar with Article 2. Despite all of that, her appointment moved forward this week. With Diane Feinstein finally returning to work, the Democrats had enough people on the Judiciary Committee to advance her nomination along with two other rather dubious nominees. (Fox News)

A President Biden judicial nominee who struggled to answer fundamental questions about the Constitution has advanced through a Senate committee.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted 11 to 10 to advance Judge Charnelle Bjelkengren, a Biden judicial nominee for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington. Bjelkengren and two contentious judicial nominees moved on due to Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s return to Congress after battling an illness.

Bjelkengren garnered headlines earlier this year after appearing before the committee, where she said she did not know the answer to some questions from Republican Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy about the Constitution.

It’s not as if the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee and the rest of the Senate have been tanking all of Biden’s nominees. There have been quite a few that appeared to at least have the minimum qualifications and have been approved in a bipartisan fashion. (As they should.) But Bjelkengren is just the latest example of how partisan bickering in both chambers has turned the normal procedures in Congress into a sideshow that should rightly reduce the public’s confidence in these institutions.

In a more normal world, a nominee for a District Court seat who couldn’t describe the purpose of two fundamental articles in the Constitution wouldn’t be seriously considered for a position as a clerk, unless we’re talking about a grocery clerk. The courts all across the United States are filled with jurists nominated by people from both parties who have at least mastered the basics and might do a good job further up the ladder.

Bjelkengren came off looking more and more like a “diversity” pick than one of the most qualified candidates. But the Democrats couldn’t back down and side with their GOP colleagues in asking Biden to name someone else. They probably feared being called out as racists or sexists or whichever other “ists” might apply to Judge Bjelkengren. Or perhaps they just wanted to “own the cons” on the committee.

But the end result is the same. Why should anyone have any confidence in the supposedly serious nature of the confirmation process at this point? What are the criteria that the members are currently using? I’m sure that Judge Bjelkengren is a perfectly nice person and she must have graduated from law school to get to where she is today. But if that’s how she performed when being questioned at her confirmation hearing, what will she be like on the bench? Surely we could be doing better.