On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate voted 50-47 to confirm Nicole Berner as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She did not pick up the support of a single Republican. She got no support from supposedly moderate GOP women like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who both opposed her. She got no support from Lindsey Graham who often votes for Democratic judicial nominees. Graham abstained. So, what was so awful about Ms. Berner?

I suppose you can pick your poison. Maybe it was her undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies from Cal-Berkeley. That sounds pretty “woke” to me. Or maybe it was her Master of Public Policy and Juris Doctor from that same notoriously leftist campus. Or it could have been that she holds dual American-Israeli citizenship. That kind of biographical tidbit seems to arouse suspicion on both sides of the aisle at the moment. But standard issue conservative Jew-hating probably doesn’t explain opposition in this case. More likely, it has to do with this from June 2000:

Israel’s High Court of Justice this week ordered the government to register a lesbian couple as the mothers of the child they are raising.

The ruling was denounced by fervently Orthodox legislators, who called the decision degrading to the sanctity of the Jewish family.

The three-judge panel ruled 2-1 on Monday that registering the two women as the child’s mothers did not reflect a biological relationship to the child, but a legal status.

The Interior Ministry, which refused to recognize the women, had argued that it is biologically impossible for a child to have two mothers.

The couple, Ruti and Nicole Berner-Kadish, have been together for seven years and hold dual Israeli and American citizenship.

Now, that seems Woke! as hell. Massachusetts didn’t permit gay marriage in the United States until four years later. And there are still many states that do not permit second-parent adoption by same-sex couples.

But Ms. Berner didn’t stop with winning landmark LGBTQ+ rights decisions.  She spent three years working as a staff attorney for Planned Parenthood. I can’t think of any organization more likely to make Republicans see red, but the SEIU labor union is a contender. Ms. Berner has worked there for years, eventually rising to be general counsel.

Now, the 4th Circuit encompasses the two Carolinas, the two Virginias and Maryland. As you might imagine, this isn’t an historically left-leaning court. Now that Berner has joined it, the court has 8 Democratic-nominated judges and 6 Republican-nominated judges, with an additional judge who was jointly nominated by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. On the whole, the 4th Circuit is now modestly to the left of center. And that’s one positive consequence of Joe Biden winning the 2020 election. Berner is the third Biden nominee to sit on the 4th Circuit, which exactly matches the three that Trump put there.

I don’t know how Berner is going to rule on cases, but I do know that she never would have had a chance to sit on an appeals court if the filibuster were still in place for judicial nominees. Her background and identity are too threatening to the right.

On the flip side, there are a lot of people on the right who are sitting on courts now who are threatening as hell. I’m looking at you, Aileen Cannon.