On 2/8/2024, Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary questioned President Joe Biden’s nominee for the federal bench in Rhode Island about her political leanings.

“Are you still a Marxist?” Sen. John Neely Kennedy asked state District Judge Melissa R. DuBose at the hearing on her nomination to U.S. District Court citing a 2000 interview she gave to the “feminist press” Women’s Studies Quarterly, in which she told the interviewer that shortly after graduating Providence College, she began working at Little Connie’s, a local coffee shop, where she said students from a private, progressive high school had her “in a Marxist phase.”

“I had no idea that that interview was something that was going to be published,” DuBose said. “When I graduated from college, I immersed myself in a ton of political theory. I read Hobbes, I read Locke, I read Rousseau, I read Marx. I went through a phase where I was into Eastern religion—where I read the Tao Te Ching and The Analects of Confucius.”

“So I suspect, and I don’t know that the quote in the article, I don’t know if she was referring to what I was studying at the time, but as a political science major and as a theorist, and as someone who was considering teaching a course in political theory, I had immersed myself,” she continued.

But Kennedy persisted. “You didn’t say ‘I’m in my Hobbesian phase,’” he continued. “You didn’t say ‘I’m in my Rousseau phase,’ you said, ‘I was in my Marxist phase.’”

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“Senator, I have never been a Marxist and I am not a Marxist today,” DuBose said as her wife and two sons observed.

Kennedy then questioned DuBose whether she has ever practiced in the federal judiciary. She said she has not. He asked her if she knew what various legal terms meant, such as voir dire, which is the questioning of potential jurors by litigators. “I preside over trials every day,” said DuBose, who was nominated to the state’s busiest court in 2018 by then-Gov. Gina Raimondo.

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Kennedy questions DuBose “Are you still a Marxist?”, ever practiced in federal judiciary?