WASHINGTON – For a very brief time, it appeared Neomi Rao’s nomination to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit might be in trouble.

Rao’s inflammatory op-eds as an undergraduate at Yale University drew a rebuke from Sen. Joni Ernst, one of the new Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, when Rao appeared for her confirmation hearing on Feb. 5. Ernst, who has spoken about being a victim of sexual assault, said Rao’s writings about date rape “give [her] pause.” A few weeks later, Axios reported that Sen. Josh Hawley, another new Republican on the committee, had concerns about Rao’s judicial philosophy on abortion.

In the end, both Hawley and Ernst threw their support behind Rao, and whatever small chance there was of Rao’s nomination getting pulled or delayed disappeared. The Senate confirmed her on Wednesday by a party-line vote. She’ll take Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s former seat on the DC Circuit, a court that handles high-profile fights over executive power and federal agency actions, and has long been a springboard to the US Supreme Court.

The fact that Rao and other controversial nominees have made it through while some have failed in the Republican-controlled Senate shows where the line seems to be for GOP members to break with President Donald Trump on judicial nominees. Filling judicial vacancies has been a top priority for the White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Trump has already broken records with the number of judges confirmed in his first two years in office. Republicans are not eager to get in the way of that progress.

A common thread among unsuccessful nominees to date have been accusations of racism and of withholding information from key decision-makers. Thomas Farr’s nomination to a North Carolina district court never went to final vote amid scrutiny of whether he was involved in efforts to suppress minority voters in the 1980s and early 1990s. Brett Talley’s nomination to a seat in Alabama was pulled in part because of online writings he didn’t disclose to the Senate, including one where he defended the early Ku Klux Klan.

Ryan Bounds’ nomination to the 9th Circuit blew up over his college writings, which he hadn’t disclosed to a home-state nominating commission, including one where he accused campus “multiculturalists” of stereotyping minorities with conservative views, and then listed some of the derogatory terms he claimed were used to describe those minorities. Bounds said he'd followed the nominating commission's instructions, and acknowledged using "overheated" and "overzealous" language, but insisted he was criticizing others who used offensive terms.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator, became a key vote to watch last year in situations where a nominee was accused of racism or racial insensitivity; he came out against Farr and Bounds. Republicans have a stronger hold on the Senate this year, though, making the dissent of one senator less impactful.