WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans handed President Donald Trump a win on Tuesday by confirming one of his first judicial nominees, Josh Divine, an archconservative from Missouri. But they had help from a surprising source: Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with Democrats.
Divine, 35, will now hold a lifetime seat on a U.S. district court in Missouri. He drew strong opposition from Democrats and civil rights groups over his long record of litigation against women’s reproductive rights, including leading a major challenge to the FDA’s decades-long approval of mifepristone, aka the abortion pill.
In 2010, Divine also argued in favor of bringing back literacy tests for voting, a practice banned in the 1960s for being racially discriminatory.
It’s not clear why King supported him. The independent senator supports abortion rights and voting rights, and doesn’t typically buck Democratic leadership on judicial nominations. His office declined comment.
But it appears that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who used to be Divine’s boss, simply persuaded King to vote for his former chief counsel as the vote was underway on the Senate floor.
CSPAN footage shows King walking up to Hawley and having a friendly conversation with him during Divine’s vote in the Senate. And King told a Law360 reporter on Wednesday that he did talk to Hawley about Divine, and that the Missouri senator “convinced me that he would be a capable judge.”
King’s vote has infuriated and confused at least some progressive groups.
“To say Senator King’s vote on the nomination of Joshua Divine is a shock would be a massive understatement,” Maggie Jo Buchanan, interim director of Demand Justice, said in a statement. “Any person who believes in the critical importance of reproductive rights would not vote to put an anti-abortion extremist in a lifetime position on the federal bench. The Senator owes his constituents an explanation — whatever that may be.”
What’s weirder is that, days ago, King voted against a procedural step for advancing Divine’s nomination. What could Hawley have possibly said to get King on board with a judicial nominee who represents so much of what King has fought against?
The Maine senator is a proud supporter of abortion rights. He railed against the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, and specifically tied it to “the clear, decades-long conservative campaign to fill our nation’s court system with ideologically-driven judges who would vote to end abortion access.”
“While there is no clear or easy path to reverse this decision, I will continue doing everything in my power to protect this fundamental right,” King said at the time.
As solicitor general of Missouri, Divine defended his state’s move to block Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid reimbursements, and defended the state’s extreme requirements for accessing abortion care, including making women endure mandatory waiting periods, ultrasounds and pelvic exams.
King supports LGBTQ rights. Earlier this year, he voted against banning transgender athletes from school sports programs, and he was previously an original sponsor of the Equality Act, a comprehensive bill to ban discrimination against LGBTQ people.
In sharp contrast, Divine defended Missouri’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, and this year represented the state in a case trying to challenge conversion therapy bans.
King has also been a vocal critic of Trump’s lawlessness, delivering impassioned speeches on the Senate floor about the administration’s “unconstitutional and unprecedented overreach.”
“This is a constitutional crisis, and we’ve got to respond to it,” he pleaded in February. “We do things constitutionally. Yes, it’s more cumbersome, it’s slower, that’s what the framers intended. They didn’t intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that’s what we’re headed for.”
Divine, meanwhile, has strongly defended Trump’s actions and power. Last year, he unsuccessfully led a long-shot bid to put a hold on Trump’s felony convictions in his hush money case. More recently, in February, Divine was on social media defending the so-called unitary executive theory, which would give even more presidential power to Trump.
It’s not clear if King knew any or all of this about Divine before he voted for him. His office did not respond to a follow-up request for comment about King’s conversation with Hawley.
A Hawley spokesperson also did not respond to a request for comment.
Reproductive Freedom for All, a national abortion rights group, didn’t specifically call out King but condemned Divine’s confirmation.
“Divine’s confirmation makes clear that Trump lied to voters when he said he would ‘leave it to the states,’ and he is actively working to eliminate abortion access nationwide,” Mini Timmaraju, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “Federal courts are a critical line of defense to preserve reproductive health care, and these appointments are a dangerous sign of what’s to come.”