Senate confirms Mary Rowland for federal judge in Chicago: Pick of Durbin, Duckworth part of ‘Illinois deal’

As a result of a deal between the Illinois Democratic Senators and the Trump White House, the Senate Wednesday confirmed Mary Rowland — who volunteered for former President Barack Obama and a Michigan Democratic Senator — to be a federal district court judge in Chicago, making her the first LGBTQ judge Trump has put on the bench.

Rowland, a federal magistrate judge in Chicago since 2012, was confirmed on a voice vote.

Her confirmation for a lifetime appointment is noteworthy because it comes as Trump and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell are intent on getting conservative judges on the bench — and Rowland was the pick of two Democrats.

Senators Dick Durbin, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Tammy Duckworth forged a deal with the Trump White House that for every three federal district judges in Illinois the Republicans want, the Democrats get a pick. In previous years, with a Democratic president in the White House, the three-to-one ratio was flipped.

This system of finding mutually agreeable federal nominees goes back more than a decade, with the deal first struck with Durbin and former GOP Illinois Senator Peter Fitzgerald, who served between 1999 and 2005.

The Illinois congressional delegation has an incentive because the nominations are shared to an extent no matter the party of the president.

The White House has an incentive to cooperate because home state senators wield, by custom, “blue slip” veto power over district court nominees, which gives them leverage.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who studies and writes about judicial selections told the Chicago Sun-Times, “The White House consulted with the home state senators and the home state senators worked with the White House to get a package of highly qualified mainstream nominees. The threat was if the White House would not consult and just jammed it down the throat of the senators, they would exercise their blue slip prerogative and the nominees would go nowhere.”

Blue slips were not needed because “Durbin is on the committee and knows how to work with the White House no matter who is there,” Tobias said.

Rowland was part of three-person package renominated for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, by Trump last April along with Chicago lawyers Martha Pacold and Steven Seeger.

The consultative process in Illinois yielded Pacold and Seeger, who worked for conservative judges and Rowland, who has supported Democratic candidates.

Pacold was also confirmed on Wednesday. Pacold is the first female Asian American district court judge in Chicago, according to Duckworth.

Seeger is expected to be confirmed in September, according to Durbin’s office.

Pacold, Rowland and Seeger were first nominated by Trump on June 7, 2018. They never got a confirmation vote for reasons that have nothing to do with them. Because their nominations expired last January, at the end of the 115th Congress, they needed to be re-nominated.

Rowland volunteered for Barack Obama on Election Day in 2008 as a legal observer at a polling place and in 1984 worked as an organizer on Carl Levin’s Democratic Senate campaign, according to her questionnaire submitted to the Judiciary Committee.

Before becoming a magistrate, Rowland was a partner at the law firm of Hughes, Socol, Piers, Resnick & Dym. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of Michigan; her J.D. is from the University of Chicago Law School.

At her August, 2018 confirmation hearing, Rowland said, ““I met my wife Julie Justicz over 30 years ago at the University of Chicago Law school; we have been in love ever since.”

Pacold is a former law clerk for conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She is currently serving as the deputy general counsel at the Treasury Department. She is a former partner at the Chicago law firm of Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott.

She is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School; her B.A. is from Indiana University.

Seeger is a former law clerk for conservative U.S. Court of Appeals Judge David Sentelle. He is the senior trial counsel in the Chicago Regional Office of the Securities and Exchange Commissions, serving since 2010. Before that, he was a partner at Kirkland & Ellis.

He earned his undergraduate degree at Wheaton College and his law degree from the University of Michigan.