Ryan Bounds

On January 3, 2018, Bounds's nomination was returned to the President under Rule XXXI, Paragraph 6 of the United States Senate. On January 5, 2018, President Donald Trump announced his intent to renominate Bounds to a federal judgeship. On January 8, 2018, his renomination was sent to the Senate. In February 2018, the bipartisan commission cited by Wyden and Merkley found Bounds to be one of four suitable applicants for the judgeship. However, the Senators continued to refuse to turn in their blue slips, citing college newspaper articles Bounds wrote while a student at Stanford University in the 1990s. On May 9, 2018, a hearing on his nomination was held before the Senate Judiciary Committee. On June 7, 2018, his nomination was reported out of committee by an 11–10 party-line vote. On July 18, 2018, the Senate voted 50–49 to invoke cloture on his nomination. On July 19, 2018, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that Bounds’s nomination would be withdrawn after Senator Tim Scott, a Republican, announced he could not support the nomination with the information he had at that point; Scott's stance left Bounds's nomination short of the number of votes needed for confirmation. Scott is the first African American to be elected to the Senate from the Deep South since the 19th Century. On July 24, 2018, the Bounds nomination was officially withdrawn.

On September 7, 2017, President Trump nominated Bounds to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, to the seat vacated by Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, who assumed senior status on December 31, 2016.

Already controversial, the nomination lost bipartisan support for confirmation in the Senate when it was revealed that, as an undergraduate, Bounds wrote columns criticizing outrage over vandalism of a gay pride statue, arguing student efforts to promote racial diversity in fact entrench racial intolerance, suggesting multicultural campus groups were in reality an effort to extort the university, and asserting "there is nothing really inherently wrong with the University failing to punish an alleged rapist—regardless his guilt—in the absence of adequate certainty," among other things. In July 2018, Mitch McConnell withdrew the nomination.

Bounds has been a member of the Federalist Society since approximately 2000.

Ryan Wesley Bounds (born June 28, 1973) is an American attorney serving as an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Oregon. Bounds had been a nominee for a position as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.