The U.S. Senate on Tuesday elevated an Ohio appeals court judge with a track record of opposing abortion and LGBTQ causes to the federal bench, as Republicans push to fill as many judicial vacancies as the November midterm elections approach.
The Republican-led Senate voted 52-45 in favor of Judge Matthew Byrne joining the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio as a life-tenured federal judge after he was nominated by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Trump, in a social media post in May, said that he nominated Byrne at the recommendation of both of Ohio’s Republican senators as well as Vice President JD Vance, who before the 2024 election was one of the state’s senators.
Byrne, a Republican, was elected to Ohio’s Twelfth District Court of Appeals in 2020 after spending a decade as an employment litigator at Jackson Lewis, where he represented corporate employers.
U.S. Senator Jon Husted of Ohio during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in June touted Byrne’s accomplishments, saying he had decided more than 800 appeals and had written majority, concurring and dissenting opinions in nearly 250 cases.
“Judge Byrne has earned a distinguished reputation as a hardworking, thoughtful, and fair judge,” he said. “He has remained dedicated to upholding the reputation of the court and the rule of law.”
During his judicial campaign, Byrne openly embraced conservative positions, particularly on abortion. In a 2020 survey from Ohio Right to Life PAC, completed while 1973’s Roe v. Wade still guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion, Byrne highlighted his longstanding involvement in “pro-life efforts throughout my career.”
In the same survey, Byrne said he opposed abortion except to protect the life of the mother, an exception that should be “strictly defined so as to avoid creating loopholes.”
After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2023 protecting abortion rights in the state.
Byrne, while serving as a visiting judge on the Ohio Supreme Court, later dissented from a December 2023 decision dismissing an appeal involving Ohio’s six-week abortion ban.
Senate Democrats pressed him on his involvement in that case as well as his views on LGBTQ rights at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing and in post-hearing written questionnaires.
They asked him about his response to another 2020 candidate survey, in which Byrne agreed with the statement that the “judiciary does not possess the authority to expand the definition of marriage to include anything but one man and one woman,” despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
Asked about his response, Byrne wrote that his record “reveals that I consistently apply binding precedent.”
On the Ohio appeals court, Byrne in March authored a three-judge panel’s opinion that upheld a juvenile court’s decision to grant permanent custody of a child to a child services agency.
That ruling, opens new tab garnered some attention in conservative circles for a footnote in which Byrne took issue with a suggestion in the juvenile court’s decision that the parents were unfit because they were initially reluctant to embrace their child’s transgender status.
“Children who struggle with these issues deserve sober and sensitive guidance, and Ohio law does not require parents unquestioningly to accept whatever their children say about their gender identity or sexuality at that particular moment,” Byrne wrote.