Justice Don Willett, dubbed the Texas “Tweeter Laureate,” could not escape that title Wednesday in a Senate hearing on his nomination to a powerful federal appeals court.

President Donald Trump nominated Willett in September, along with Gibson Dunn & Crutcher partner James Ho, to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Willett has served on the Supreme Court of Texas since 2005, and his presence on social media has made him a semi-celebrity in legal circles. He largely stopped tweeting after his nomination, but his Twitter use was the subject of one of the first questions he faced.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, asked if Willett would keep tweeting if confirmed.

“The short answer is, I don't know if I'll continue tweeting,” Willett said. “I haven't thought a lot about it, but if I do, certainly the frequency and the content would change.”

Willett said if he did tweet as a Fifth Circuit judge, he would focus on “civic education” and improving “our collective national civics IQ.”

Later, Sen. John Kennedy, R-Louisiana, asked the same question, and Willett gave a similar answer. But Kennedy expressed concern and asked that Willett consider not tweeting if confirmed. Willett promised the senator that if he did tweet, he would “post nothing that could be remotely construed as political.”

“Don't you think the wiser course would be to just not do it?” Kennedy said. Willett said his wife agreed, and that he would think about it and get back to the senator.

Several senators asked Willett about a 2014 tweet in which he retweeted a story from Fox News about a 17-year-old transgender woman joining a girl's softball team with the caption “Go away A-Rod,” referring to the former baseball player Alex Rodriguez.

Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, asked Willett to explain the joke, and said it appeared Willett was demeaning the teenager.

“The tweet was a kind of off-kilter attempt at levity that missed the bull's eye, but it was never an attempt to disparage or demean her in any way, shape or form,” Willett replied.

Another tweet that caught senators' attention was a 2015 post after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which upheld the right of same-sex couples to get married. Willett tweeted a picture of bacon and wrote “I could support recognizing a constitutional right to marry bacon.”

Asked about the tweet by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, Willett said it was an attempt to lighten the mood after a ruling that divided the country.

“It was my attempt to inject a bit of levity,” Willett told the senator.

“And you think that cut back the divisiveness?” Leahy asked.

“I believe that every American is entitled to equal worth and dignity,” Willett replied. “I never intended to disparage anyone. That's not where my heart is.”

As for Ho, he faced few questions compared with Willett. Most of the questioning from Democrats for Ho related to a memo he wrote while working for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2001. The memo was cited in a footnote of the now-infamous torture memo authored by Judge Jay Bybee, who was then the assistant attorney general. Though Bybee's memo is public, Ho's is not.

In response to a question from Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, Ho said he had “no involvement” in drafting the Bybee memo. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, also pushed Ho on why his memo was not made public.

“It's a memo that is subject, as I understand it, to attorney-client privilege,” Ho said. He said that in this case, the Justice Department was the client and only DOJ could release it.

The committee will likely vote on the nominations for Ho and Willett in the next few weeks, though it's unclear when the full Senate will take up their nominations.