New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján may return to D.C. within six weeks, aide says

A senior aide to Sen. Ben Ray Luján told the Las Cruces Sun-News Thursday the senator continues to recover at UNM Hospital in Albuquerque and was expected to return to Washington in four to six weeks.

The 49-year-old Democrat, who is serving his first term in the Senate after 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, suffered a cerebellar stroke on Jan. 27 while he was in New Mexico, and underwent decompression surgery the same day.

Since the senator's illness was announced on Tuesday, speculation rose about the impact on business in the U.S. Senate, especially for confirmation of President Joe Biden's Supreme Court nominee. The Senate is divided evenly between Democratic and Republican members, while Vice President Kamala Harris wields a tie-breaking vote. The absence of a single Democratic member effectively suspends the party's majority.

The senior aide pointed out that Biden has yet to even to name a nominee, and the process would take weeks or even months after the president names his choice to succeed retiring Justice Stephen Breyer.

The average length of time between a Supreme Court nomination and a final vote in the U.S. Senate is 68 days, per the Congressional Research Service. The last nomination to the nation's high court, however, was unusually swift: Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed in 2020 just one month after her nomination by President Donald Trump, just ahead of a presidential election.

The prospect of Republicans uniting to defeat any Supreme Court nominee Biden chooses seemed to dim as some Senate Republicans, including Judiciary Committee member Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., expressed openness to considering Biden's choice over the week.

Algernon D'Ammassa can be reached at 575-541-5451, adammassa@lcsun-news.com or @AlgernonWrites on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Sen. Ben Ray Luján may return to D.C. within six weeks, aide says