Trump’s Crazy Choices for the Courts
He also attacked the Supreme Court’s opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, permitting race to be a consideration in college admissions to further diversity; he said it was akin to the court’s rulings in the Dred Scott decision (upholding fugitive slave laws), Plessy v. Ferguson (upholding states’ rights to require racially segregated public accommodations)
and Korematsu v. United States (approving the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II).
President Bush recommended him for the same seat in 2006,
but the Senate Judiciary Committee did not even advance his nomination to the full Senate, probably because of his longstanding ties to racist politicians, and because of his opposition to voting rights, workers’ rights and economic equality.
Mr. Farr, a lawyer in Raleigh, was instrumental in creating
and defending North Carolina’s notorious 2013 voter suppression law, which the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found had targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision.”
Damien Schiff, a lawyer for the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation, was nominated to the
Court of Federal Claims, which primarily hears suits seeking damages from the government.
While blogging under a pseudonym in 2008, he compared the Dred Scott decision to Roe v. Wade, saying
that both “relied on similar reasoning and activist justices” and that “slavery and abortion” are the “two greatest tragedies in our country.” On his Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire he failed to disclose that he belonged to a social club that, for years, had excluded African-Americans, women and Jews
Some of President Trump’s nominees, however, are so far outside the mainstream
that even conservative Republicans like Senators John Kennedy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas have expressed dismay.
