The Senate confirmed District Judge Florence Pan to take the seat on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated by now Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, making Pan the first Chinese-American to sit on the influential Circuit Court, Reuters reports.
By a 52-42 votes, Pan moves up from the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, to which she was appointed by President Joe Biden in September 2021. The 55-year-old Pan was originally appointed to the federal bench by Barack Obama in 2009.
Obama had originally nominated Pan to the US District Court in 2016, and her nomination made it out of the Republican-led Judiciary Committee, but was held up by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who claimed lame duck presidents should not make judicial appointments, a position he dropped when a Republican was in the White House nominating a Supreme Court justice.
Editors’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Pan would be the first Asian-American on the DC Circuit Court. That was incorrect: she is the first Chinese-American assigned to the court.