By Michele Jawando and Billy Corriher
President Trump is famous for his online outbursts—the first president who tweets out attacks against his critics and against judges whose rulings he does not like. President Trump recently nominated two lawyers with a history of offensive online remarks, in addition to statements in legal briefs, to lifetime positions as federal judges. The progressive People for the American Way warned that the nominees’ blog posts “traffic in classic right-wing tropes about women’s rights, LGBTQ equality, and the place of the judicial system.” The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the nominees on Wednesday.
John Bush, a nominee for the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, is very close to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. His wife was on the board of directors of a group that raised millions to support Sen. McConnell’s 2014 reelection, and Bush approached Sen. McConnell about being a judge after the 2016 election. Bush, who blogged for “Elephants in the Bluegrass” under a pseudonym, has also been criticized for belonging to a club that was sued in 1999 for discriminating against African Americans. Bush did not mention this in response to the Judiciary Committee’s question about whether he had ever belonged to a club that discriminates on the basis of race, gender, or religion.
President Trump nominated Damien Schiff, a lawyer with the anti-environmentalist Pacific Legal Foundation, to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which hears lawsuits against the government. Schiff has a broad view of the Constitution’s Takings Clause, which requires fair compensation when the government takes property. The Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group, said that Schiff’s view of the Takings Clause would “second-guess local officials and…invalidate efforts by governments to address the needs and rights of its citizens.”
Here are five offensive remarks by these bloggers who could become judges, but there are many more:
- Schiff called Justice Anthony Kennedy “a judicial prostitute, ‘selling’ his vote as it were to four other justices in exchange for the high that comes from aggrandizement of power & influence.”
- Bush has compared slavery to a woman’s right to an abortion. He once wrote, “The two greatest tragedies in our country—slavery and abortion—relied on similar reasoning and activist justices at the U.S. Supreme Court, first in the Dred Scott decision, and later in Roe.”
- Schiff, who made a career challenging environmental regulations, accused the Environmental Protection Agency of “treating American citizens…as if they were just slaves.”
- In a brief defending the Virginia Military Institute’s former male-only admissions policy, Bush argued that the education offered by VMI “does not appear to be compatible with the somewhat different developmental needs of most young women.”
- Schiff contributed to a brief in Citizens United that argued that “corporate speech adds value to our democratic society and should not be treated as a malignancy that the body politic rejects.”
These statements alone should disqualify these two lawyers from lifetime positions as federal judges. They clearly do not have the temperament or impartiality that judges require. The Code of Judicial Conduct says judges should never exhibit bias or belong to discriminatory clubs. These nominees’ statements suggest they could not satisfy these rules, and Bush once publicly used an anti-LGBT slur.
These lawyer/bloggers are among Trump’s first batch of judicial nominees. The Twitter president may be looking to appoint Internet provocateurs like himself to lifetime positions as federal judges.
Michele Jawando (@MicheleJawando) is the Vice President of Legal Progress at the Center for American Progress (CAP). Billy Corriher (@BillyCorriher) is the Deputy Director of Legal Progress at CAP.
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