President Trump has made a habit of selecting unqualified judicial nominees. So far, he’s nominated four candidates the American Bar Association, or ABA, has found “not qualified.” But all non-qualified judges are not alike. Two picks he’s just renominated appear to have strained the ABA’s capacity for euphemistic communications.
Magistrate Judge Charles Goodwin isn’t even showing up to the court he currently sits on, according to the ABA. Who’s to say he’d bother to trek to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma?
The Standing Committee’s concerns centered upon Magistrate Judge Goodwin's work ethic and availability to perform judicial duties. As set forth in the Backgrounder, integrity encompasses a nominee’s industry and diligence, and professional competence includes a nominee’s judgment. Magistrate Judge Goodwin's work habits, including his frequent absence from the courthouse until mid-afternoon, raised doubt for a majority of the Standing Committee’s members with respect to Magistrate Judge Goodwin’s ability to fulfill the demands of a federal judge appointed under Article III of the United States Constitution. Inaccessibility issues generated concerns about the timely and efficient administration of justice.
Then there's Holly Teeter, who Trump nominated to Kansas’ single federal district court—and isn’t qualified to be a judge at all.
The Committee believes that Ms. Teeter does not presently have the requisite trial experience or its equivalent.
In fact, Teeter doesn’t have any trial experience.
For context, “not qualified” ratings were, until Trump, quite rare.
Judicial nominees rarely earn such an abysmal rating from the ABA, which has reviewed more than 1,700 federal judicial nominees since 1989. None of President Barack Obama’s nominees were rated “not qualified” during his eight years in office. Eight of President George W. Bush’s earned the rating during his two terms. In Trump’s case, four have earned the rating in his first year. Senate Republicans actually confirmed one of them, for some reason. The other one bowed out in embarrassment.
Part of Trump’s problem is that he’s flying through judicial nominations without much vetting, and he’s not submitting potential court picks to the ABA before he announces their nominations. Most presidents wait for the ABA rating to come out before announcing a nominee, in part to save face in case one of their nominees gets a bad rating. Obama had a handful of potential court picks who got a “not qualified” rating, but then they were never formally nominated.
Republicans in the Senate have joined Trump in ignoring the ABA’s reviews, which were previously an integral part of the confirmation process. They already confirmed now-Judge Leonard Steven Grasz to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals (Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and both Dakotas) despite his own “not qualified” designation.
The ABA interviewed more than 180 people connected to Grasz, who was Nebraska’s chief deputy attorney general for 11 years, in evaluating his fitness to be a judge. Colleagues described him as “gratuitously rude,” per the ABA report, and said they had an “unusual fear” of consequences if they said anything negative about him because of his “deep connection” to powerful politicians in Nebraska.
ABA members also raised concerns that Grasz would be “unable to separate his role as an advocate from that of a judge,” given his record on issues like LGBTQ and abortion rights. Among other things, Grasz served on a nonprofit board that backed so-called conversion therapy for LGBTQ kids, and in a 1999 article argued that lower courts should be able to overrule Supreme Court decisions on abortion rights because “abortion jurisprudence is, to a significant extent, a word game.”
“In sum, the evaluators and the Committee found that temperament issues, particularly bias and lack of open-mindedness, were problematic,” reads a statement by Pam Bresnahan, the chair of the ABA’s standing committee that reviews nominees. “The evaluators found that the people interviewed believed that the nominee’s bias and the lens through which he viewed his role as a judge colored his ability to judge fairly.”
Other spectacularly unqualified federal judicial nominees, like Brett Talley and Jeff Mateer, have withdrawn from the confirmation process. For the most part, though, Republicans have succeeded at rushing confirmations. Each one of these anti-LGBT, racist, and/or unqualified individuals will get to decide what constitutes justice for Americans before their court and in their jurisdictions day to day for a lifetime. That’s why protesting each and every one is critical.