mcconnell came back after three months. the vote he came back for was a judge who misgenders children in writing.
via the Advocate, with the Senate's own roll call, CNBC and WKYT.
Forty-seven to forty-six.
That is the whole thing, and it is on the Senate's own website, vote number 232, timestamped 5:31 in the evening on Monday. Seven senators did not vote at all. Which means that if Mitch McConnell had stayed home on Monday the way he had stayed home every day since June, the motion fails on a tie and Matthew R. Byrne is still waiting.
He did not stay home. He was wheeled into the chamber flanked by his chief of staff and a longtime aide, made his first appearance in three months, and voted yes.
what the vote actually was
Cloture, not confirmation, and the difference matters because half of X spent Monday night announcing a confirmation that has not happened. Cloture ends debate. It is the procedural vote, the boring one, the one nobody covers. Byrne's final vote is still ahead of him, which means this story has a second act and so do the senators who skipped the first one.
Byrne currently sits on Ohio's Twelfth District Court of Appeals. The seat he is headed for is the federal district court for the Southern District of Ohio, which is a lifetime appointment, and district judges are the ones who actually decide whether a hospital can stop your kid's care or whether a school has to let a club meet. We have watched a federal judge be the only thing standing between a gay-straight alliance and a school board twice this month alone.
the sentence in his own opinion
In March, Byrne wrote for a three-judge panel in a custody case involving a 14-year-old. The line everyone has quoted since is this one: "There is no requirement in Ohio law that parents must unquestioningly accept and support their minor children's claims of transsexual identity or preferred pronouns."
That is the holding, and reasonable people can argue about family court. The line nobody is quoting is four sentences earlier, where the court explains its own house style: "The record indicates that, during the pendency of the children's services case, Sara repeatedly changed the pronouns that she prefers. We will refer to Sara accurately, as a female."
Accurately. A judge put the word accurately in a published opinion about a child, and then did it, in writing, permanently, in a document that kid can look up for the rest of her life.
the rest of the file
Byrne has been affiliated with Ohio Right to Life, Cincinnati Right to Life, Warren County Right to Life and the Federalist Society, and served as an informal adviser from 2014 through 2018 to the Center for Christian Virtue, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designated a hate group after it campaigned against the Ohio Fairness Act. On a seven-judge panel he was the only one to object to dismissing Ohio's six-week abortion ban after a Hamilton County judge struck it down. Reproductive Freedom For All came out against him on that record. So did we, just now.
McConnell, for his part, told reporters he has assured John Thune he will "do my best to be present for tough votes when our Conference needs me." Everyone took that as a statement about his health. It was a statement about what he plans to do with the time he has left, and Monday was the demonstration. The same institution that has spent a decade handing these fights to judges keeps finding one more judge to hand them to.
He came back for this. Not a budget, not a war, not a farm bill. This.
