Whose serious needs matter?

It’s all just a game to some of them.

As Democrats lauded the White House’s 200th judicial confirmation, though, a partisan firestorm raged in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Republicans ground proceedings to a halt during a confirmation hearing for the latest slate of court nominees.

Among the appointees who faced questioning Wednesday morning was Sarah Netburn, tapped by the Biden administration to join the bench on the Southern District of New York.

GOP lawmakers on the committee dialed in on a 2022 case she presided over as a magistrate judge in the same district, in which she granted the request of an incarcerated transgender woman who asked to move to a women’s prison from a men’s prison. The petitioner was a registered sex offender serving a sentence for distributing child pornography.


And a man. Men should not be in women’s prisons, because it’s not safe for the women.

Republicans, pointing out that the petitioner had previously served an 18-year sentence for sexually assaulting both an underage boy and girl, framed Netburn’s decision to allow the prison transfer as a political act which put other incarcerated women at risk.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy labeled the nominee a “political activist,” a charge which she denied.

Netburn argued that she allowed the petitioner to be transferred because she had “serious medical needs,” adding that the petitioner “had engaged in no physical violence and no acts of sexual violence whatsoever” in the years since she had completed her initial sentence.

Of course all the women in that prison had serious safety needs, but apparently that doesn’t matter.

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