The Trump presidency is like a soap opera of outrageous lies, scandals, and destructive policies, but behind all that, Trump has been laying the groundwork for what could end up being his most lasting damage. As the Daily Beast reports, he’s appointing the most shockingly extreme judges to lifetime terms on Federal courts.
Take North Carolina, for example. As we know, NC is controlled by hopelessly corrupt Republicans, who have done everything they can to suppress minority votes to cement their hold on power. The Eastern District of North Carolina is 30% black. The Eastern District Court has never had a black judge. So, who does Trump nominate?
To that seat, one of 59 stolen from President Obama by Republican obstructionism, Trump has named <Thomas> Farr, whom the Congressional Black Caucus described as “the preeminent attorney for North Carolina Republicans seeking to curtail the voting rights of people of color….had the White House deliberately sought to identify an attorney in North Carolina with a more hostile record on African-American voting rights and workers’ rights than Thomas Farr, it could hardly have done so.”
As we know, the North Carolina voter suppression program includes gerrymandering that a court determined “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision”. Guess who argued the case in favor of the gerrymander? That’s right — Thomas Farr. Farr was also the lawyer who, as far back as 1990, defended racist senator Jesse Helm’s tactic of sending false postcards to black voters designed to keep them from voting by warning of possible arrest at polling stations.
Then there’s Texas, where Trump has nominated anti-LGTTQ religious extremist Jeff Mateer.
In 2015, Mateer said in a speech that parents suing on behalf of their transgender children “really shows you how Satan's plan is working and the destruction that's going on.”
In the same speech, he said regarding same-sex marriage that “there'll be no line there… I mean, it's disgusting. I've learned words I didn't know... Somebody wanted to marry a tree. People marrying their pets. It's just like -- you know, you read the New Testament and you read about all the things and you think, 'Oh, that's not going on in our community.' Oh yes it is. We're back to that time where debauchery rules.”
Mateer was a speaker at the ‘National Religious Liberty Conference’ run by zealot Kevin Swanson, who believes homosexuality should be punishable by death. There, Mateer spoke in defense of the thoroughly discredited practice of gay conversion therapy.
Perhaps most troubling of all, at the same conference, Mateer undermined the rule of law itself, saying that Obergefell v. Hodges is “not the law of the land” because “it’s a 5-4 decision with Justice Kennedy joining the four liberals.” This is someone whose life-tenure job would require him to respect Supreme Court precedent.
Naturally, the morally bankrupt GOP Senate is fast-tracking and rubber-stamping these nominees. This process has already led to the appointments of a number of extremists including, most notably, Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
Opposition to these nominees appears hopeless. The only chance is phone calls to the few moderate Republican senators who might possibly be willing to listen to reason. Although 2019 might be too late to reverse the worst of the damage, these appointments make it all the more important to take back the Senate in the 2018 election.