US Senate cements all-Democratic appointed bench on 1st Circuit
The U.S. Senate on Monday confirmed President Joe Biden's nominee Seth Aframe to a seat on the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, making the Boston-based federal appeals court the only one whose active judges are all Democratic appointees.
Aframe, a federal prosecutor in New Hampshire, was approved by the Democratic-led Senate on a 49-40 vote, after an earlier nominee Biden had put forward withdrew from consideration last year following opposition by Democrats and Republicans alike.
The vote gives Biden his fourth confirmed appointee to the 1st Circuit, which hears appeals from Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico, and has the fewest judges of the 13 intermediate federal appeals courts.
He fills a seat previously held by the last remaining appointee of a Republican president on the court, Jeffrey Howard, and makes the 1st Circuit unique in being the only federal appeals court whose active judges are all appointed by presidents of the same party.
Biden's other 1st Circuit appointees are Gustavo Gelpí, Lara Montecalvo and Julie Rikelman.
The vote gives Biden his 198th confirmed, life-tenured judicial appointee. The Senate is preparing this week to hand him his 200th, as Democrats and the White House push to fill as many vacancies as they can ahead of the November elections.
Aframe joined the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Hampshire in 2007, after clerking for four years for Howard, and in 2010 was named its criminal division appellate chief. In early 2023, he became chief of the criminal division.
"While Mr. Aframe's decades of experience speaks for itself, his steadfast dedication and commitment to justice throughout his career has been commendable," New Hampshire's two senators, Democrats Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, said in a statement.
Biden first nominated Aframe to the 1st Circuit in October, after his earlier nominee to a New Hampshire seat on the 1st Circuit, Michael Delaney, the former state attorney general, withdrew from Senate consideration in May 2023.
He had faced opposition in the Senate over his signing of a brief defending a New Hampshire law, since repealed, that required parental notification for minors to obtain abortions and his representation while in private practice of a boarding school that was sued in connection with a sexual assault.
Aframe's nomination proved less contentious, though some Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee criticized as too lenient the sentencing recommendations he made in a sexual assault case and a child pornography prosecution.
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