Civil rights groups and the Congressional Black Caucus have been trying to sink Farr’s nomination for nearly a year. The 64-year-old attorney wrote North Carolina’s extreme voter ID law in 2013, which was later struck down by a federal appeals court. The court found the law targeted black people “with almost surgical precision.”

Farr also defended the state’s racially discriminatory gerrymandering in federal court in 2015 (and lost), and he may have lied to the Senate about his role in disenfranchising tens of thousands of black voters when he worked for Helms in 1990.