President Joe Biden on Wednesday nominated three women to join the federal bench, including a prosecutor who helped put a Republican donor dubbed "Minnesota's Jeffrey Epstein" behind bars for sex trafficking and a California state court judge.
The White House in a statement said that the three new district court nominees in Minnesota, California and Pennsylvania reflect Biden's commitment to increasing diversity on the federal bench.
The nominees include Superior Court Judge Noël Wise in Alameda County, California, a former partner at the law firm Wise Gleicher nominated by Biden to serve as a life-tenured federal district court judge in California's Northern District.
Biden also nominated Assistant U.S. Attorneys Laura Provinzino and Mary Kay Costello to serve as federal judges in Minnesota and Pennsylvania's Eastern District, respectively.
Biden has to date won Senate confirmation of 201 of his judicial nominees, prompting hope among some Democrats that the Democrat may be able to surpass former Republican President Donald Trump's four-year total of 234 appointments to the federal bench.
Democrats hold a narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate, though, and Biden's ability to confirm more judges has been complicated by a decision by 14 Senate Republicans to oppose further judicial nominees after Trump's May 30 conviction in New York state court related to hush money paid to a porn star.
Provinzino, who has served as a federal prosecutor since 2010, was part of the prosecution team that secured the sex trafficking conviction last year of Anton "Tony" Lazzaro, a businessman and Republican donor sentenced to 21 years in prison for recruiting teenage girls to have sex with him.
Provinzino had at one time served as the president of the Infinity Project, a group that advocates for gender equity and increased diversity on the bench and receives financial support from the George Soros-founded Open Society Foundations.
Wise was first appointed to the bench by Democratic former California Governor Jerry Brown in 2014.
She has at times written opinion pieces taking stances on matters of public discussion, including LGBTQ rights, diversity and homelessness, some of which could provide fodder for Republican opponents.
In a 2017 piece in Time, Wise wrote that the country's "stringent adherence to a two-sex paradigm is inconsistent with science and incongruous with the historic and modern understanding of sex throughout many regions of the world."
Costello has served as a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania since 2008. Before that, she worked at two law firms in Philadelphia and served from 1986 to 1994 in the U.S. Air Force.
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