Against the backdrop of the bombshell news in the Russia investigation, in which we're learning more about Russia's efforts to install their pick of president, Mitch McConnell is bringing the worst, most racist judicial nominee chosen by that president to the Senate floor for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.
Thomas Farr was a member of notorious racist Sen. Jesse Helms 1990 campaign and took part in the campaign's "ballot security" effort that included sending postcards to 125,000 Black voters in North Carolina insinuating that that they were not eligible to vote and warning that if they went to the polls they could be prosecuted for voter fraud. Farr told the Judiciary Committee he had no knowledge of that project. But former Deputy Chief of the Justice Department’s voting rights section J. Gerald Hebert has evidence that shows that Farr attended a meeting about "ballot security" in October 1990, before the postcards went out. Farr very probably lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee about that.
Farr both helped draft and defended the 2013 North Carolina voter ID law that a federal court struck down because it targeted black voters "with almost surgical precision." That's a pattern of his, defending racism. In the 1990s, after the Helms campaign, he defended a rental car company when it was sued for refusing to rent to black customers in North and South Carolina.
Farr has connections with "one of the most influential racist hate groups of the 20th century: the Pioneer Fund," the "'primary source for scientific racism' well into the 2000s and one of the key funders of the fight against civil rights in the South from the 1950s onward." In other words, eugenics. Farr's longtime boss and mentor, Thomas Ellis, was "a Pioneer Fund director, grantee and close associate of the hate group's president, Harry Frederick Weyher, Jr., for over 60 years." A group "established to use science to pursue the goals of its founder: the preservation of white supremacy and white racial purity from the threat posed by blacks and undesirable immigrants, especially Jews."
That's who Thomas Farr is. That's who 50 Republican senators and Vice President Mike Pence decided deserves a vote on the floor of the Senate. Decided deserves a shot at a lifetime seat on the federal judiciary.