President Joe Biden’s bad deal with Mitch McConnell hasn’t improved in the past week since the story broke. It just keeps getting worse. Initial reports, broken by the Courier-Journal, that Biden had agreed to appoint an anti-abortion Federalist Society member, Chad Meredith, to a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. Meredith had proven too tarnished by his association with former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin to stay on Donald Trump’s nominee list, but McConnell was sticking with him. That report suggested that the agreement was this appointment for McConnell’s promise to stop blocking other nominees.
Follow-up reporting from Slate makes it worse. The agreement between Biden and McConnell isn’t for McConnell’s help in getting all nominees through—it’s a trade for two U.S. attorneys Biden wants in Kentucky—two temporary appointments, lasting probably just for the duration of the Biden administration. In trade for putting a judge that has the potential to be another Clarence Thomas on a path to the Supreme Court.
Like I said, a very bad and even more embarrassing trade. HuffPost’s Travis Waldron and Jen Bendery report on a 2018 letter Meredith’s former boss, Stephen Pitt, a general counsel to Bevin sent to McConnell. The letter was supporting Meredith’s nomination to a federal judgeship in 2018. Meredith, Pitt wrote, “would be a strong and dependable conservative asset to the federal judiciary for decades.” Pitt promised Meredith would “adhere to the textualist and originalist viewpoint followed by the late Justice Scalia and by other justices, such as Justice Thomas and Justice [Neil] Gorsuch.”
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“In sum,” Pitt concluded, “it is my opinion that the qualities I believe you think are most important in a federal judge are the same as I hold to. Based upon that belief, I can recommend Chad Meredith without reservation.” That’s the nomination Meredith didn’t get from Trump because he was so closely tied to Bevin and Bevin’s scandals. Like pardoning a convicted murderer after the murderer’s family gave him a lot of campaign cash. A pardon Meredith vetted and recommended.
Biden originally intended to announce the Meredith nomination on June 24. That’s the day the Supreme Court ruling removing Americans’ constitutional right to bodily autonomy was handed down. Gov. Andy Beshear made the letter from Biden announcing his intention public this week. The letter from White House aide Kathleen M. Marshall, sent on June 23, stated: “To be nominated tomorrow: … Stephen Chad Meredith: candidate for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.”
Rep. John Yarmuth, the senior Democrat in the Kentucky delegation, and Beshear are furious at the proposed nomination. In the absence of Democratic senators from Kentucky, these two senior Democrats are supposed to have deference from the White House in nominations. “Why you would pick him to fill a federal vacancy when you’re a Democratic president is beyond me,” Yarmuth complained. He continued, saying that the nomination is obviously “some kind of effort to appease Mitch McConnell, which is something this state and country should be very upset about.”
“Mitch McConnell was not elected by anyone outside of Kentucky, yet he is imposing his individual will on the federal judiciary and the president of the United States just because he has the power to do it, not because it makes sense good sense for our country.”
“If the president makes that nomination, it is indefensible,” Beshear said earlier this week. As of now, it’s not at all clear that Biden has changed his mind, though he hasn’t made it official yet.
National abortion rights groups issued a joint statement blasting the potential nomination. The groups, including Planned Parenthood Federation Of America, NARAL Pro-Choice America, National Women’s Law Center, National Council Of Jewish Women, All* Above All Action Fund, URGE, Catholics for Choice, and Physicians for Reproductive Health, wrote: “We are in a national abortion crisis.”
“We are in this moment because anti-abortion judges were intentionally nominated at every level to take away our fundamental right to abortion—and given his record, we know Chad Meredith would be no exception,” the statement continued. “Chad Meredith should not be nominated to a lifetime judgeship. This is unacceptable at any time, but especially on the heels of six Supreme Court justices taking away a fundamental right from millions of people.”
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