The Senate voted on Wednesday to confirm S. Kato Crews to be the U.S. District Judge for Colorado.

The upper chamber voted 51-48 on the nomination, capping off a 10-month confirmation process.

Crews, who serves as a magistrate judge for the Court of Colorado, was nominated to the district judge role by President Joe Biden in February of last year. His nomination has hit several snags since then. 

Crews came under scrutiny after he was unable to answer a question on a criminal law doctrine during his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing last March. The moment occurred when Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Crews how he’d analyze a Brady motion, referring to a decades-old legal doctrine that allows defendants to request prosecutors to turn over evidence that could be favorable to them. 

“How I analyze a Brady motion … senator, in my 4 1/2 years on the bench, I don’t believe I’ve had the occasion to address a Brady motion in my career,” Crews said, adding he believed it “involved something regarding the Second Amendment.”

Earlier this week, another Biden judicial nominee who struggled under Kennedy’s questioning bowed out of consideration.

Spokane County Superior Court Judge Charnelle Bjelkengren failed to answer Kennedy’s question providing the purpose of Article 5 of the Constitution, which lays out the process of amending the Constitution, during her confirmation hearing in January of last year.

Kennedy told the Washington Examiner in a statement on Wednesday that Bjelkengren was right to withdraw her name from consideration.

“Biden sent us a nominee who didn’t know the basics of the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote. “Judge Bjelkengren is right to bow out. Unfortunately, Biden just keeps trying to put unqualified people on the bench — for life. People who don’t know the law have no business running our courtrooms.”

Crews was one of the nominees whose confirmation process was held up in the Judiciary Committee last year over the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s prolonged absence. Democrats control the committee by a single-seat margin, meaning that her absence allowed Republicans to block any partisan votes, such as Crews’s nomination. 

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Feinstein returned to the Capitol in mid-May in a wheelchair, looking frail and at times disoriented, to advance Crews and Biden’s other judicial nominees to the full floor vote.

Feinstein died months later on Sept. 29, 2023.

Christian Datoc contributed to this report.