Ryan Bounds, a Trump nominee to join the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, was supposed to receive a confirmation vote on Thursday. That’s not happening anymore.

Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the only African-American member of Senate GOP conference, tells leaders that he can't vote for 9th Circuit Court nom Ryan Bounds because of racially insensitive remarks. Told leaders he need more time to review Bounds. McConnell withdraws nomination. — Alex Bolton (@alexanderbolton) July 19, 2018

Bounds, who currently serves as a federal prosecutor, wrote several pieces for the Stanford Review while he was an undergraduate where he mocked “the Multiculturalistas,” and compared minority interest groups at Stanford to an “Aryan Student Union.”


“Race-focused groups foster racethink,” he wrote in one such column, according to a report by the liberal Alliance for Justice, “and the only way to rid our multicultural community of race-think is to rid it of these invidious factions.” Bounds also claimed that these groups’ “tactics seem always to contribute more to restricting consciousness, aggravating intolerance, and pigeonholing cultural identities than many a Nazi bookburning.”

For the moment, it appears that Bounds’ nomination is dead. Senate Majority Leader McConnell (R-KY) reportedly announced that the “nomination will be withdrawn.”

So chalk up a defeat for the Intellectual Dark Web, which will not get to add one of its own to the federal judiciary today.