This week, Trump will tout his record nominating some anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ judges. Here are just a handful of his worst nominees:
- John Bush: compared a woman’s right to choose… to slavery. It’s no surprise he’s also a birther.
NPR: “On a party-line vote, the U.S. Senate voted Thursday to confirm President Trump’s most controversial judicial nominee to date. He is John Bush, a Kentucky lawyer and political blogger whose posts disparaged gay rights and compared the Supreme Court’s abortion decision in Roe v. Wade to its pro-slavery 1857 Dred Scott decision. And he is now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.”
NPR: “Blogging under a fake name, Bush posted more than 400 items, often citing alt-right media reports containing conspiracy theories and false information, such as the claim that former President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.”
- Kyle Duncan: an “anti-LGBT crusader” who also defended a voting law that “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
HuffPost: “As an attorney, Duncan defended North Carolina’s egregious voter suppression law that a federal appeals court struck down in 2016, ruling that it discriminated against black voters and ‘targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.’ Duncan appealed the case to the Supreme Court, calling it ‘ludicrous’ to suggest the law echoed Jim Crow laws. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal.”
Daily Beast: “Trump nominated several anti-LGBT crusaders to the bench, but none more zealous than Kyle Duncan, who said that Obergefell v. Hodges (which legalized same-sex marriage) ‘raises a question about the legitimacy of the Court,’ that transgender people are ‘delusional,’ and that state-funded adoption agencies should be able to turn away gay people.”
- Mark Norris: tried to block refugees from being settled in Nebraska and set up a website showing images of refugees alongside terrorists.
Daily Beast: “Mark Norris, former majority leader of the Tennessee Senate, was called by the left-leaning Alliance for Justice ‘an extreme outlier even among Trump nominees.’ During his tenure, Norris tried to block refugees from being settled in Nebraska (going up against Attorney General Jeff Sessions), set up a website using images of refugees alongside images of ISIS terrorists, tried to ban cities from removing Confederate statues, and pushed legislation dubbed the ‘LGBT Erasure Bill’ that would have invalidated same-sex marriages in direct violation of Obergefell.”
Nashville Post: “The letter lists Norris’s support for voter ID, separate school districts in Shelby County, anti-LGBT legislation and the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, which makes removing Confederate monuments nearly impossible, as reasons to disqualify him from the judiciary. It also notes that Norris ‘has equated refugees to terrorists and fueled Islamophobia with fear-mongering about ‘Sharia law’ in Tennessee.’”
- Eric Murphy: made a career out of making it harder for people to vote.
HuffPost: “But Murphy is perhaps best known for defending Ohio’s notorious voter purge law before the Supreme Court in 2018, arguing that the state should be able to drop people from its voter rolls if they don’t vote for six years and don’t respond to a postcard asking them to confirm their address.”
HuffPost: “In 2014, Murphy defended the elimination of Ohio’s ‘Golden Week,’ a five-day period in which voters could register and vote at the same time. The state created the period in response to the 2004 election, when many Ohio voters were forced to wait in line for up to 12 hours to vote.”
- Jeff Brown: suggested legalization of gay marriage could be grounds for Texas to secede and called rulings against Trump’s Muslim Ban “an attempted coup d’etat.”
Houston Chronicle: “Civil rights groups are decrying the president’s choice of several of the nominees, including that of Texas Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Brown, who once suggested publicly the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision allowing gay marriage could be grounds for Texas to secede again … They pointed to comments Brown made at a Jefferson County Republican Party gathering in 2015 about the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on marriage equality. ‘What can Texas do about these rulings? Short of what some states did in 1861, there’s not much that can be done,’ Brown said, according to news reports from the time.”
Houston Chronicle: “After federal judges struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travelers from a number of Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, Brown condemned the rulings during an October 2017 speech. He called the rulings ‘an attempted coup d’etat by activist judges to halt President Trump’s so-called travel ban’ and said that ‘their reasoning is not based in law but in their belief that we have an illegitimate president.’”
- Neomi Rao: made extreme comments on sexual assault, denounced “special treatment for minority students,” and called the fight for LGBTQ rights a “trendy political movement.”
Politico: “Rao, who would replace Brett Kavanaugh on the nation’s second-most powerful court, came under fire during her confirmation hearing last week over op-eds she wrote as an undergraduate at Yale. In an article on date rape, Rao wrote that if a woman ‘drinks to the point where she can no longer choose, well, getting to that point was part of her choice.’”
HuffPost: “Rao also denounced ‘special treatment for minority students’ and called the fight for LGBTQ rights a ‘trendy political movement.’”
- Michael Truncale: called President Obama an “un-American imposter” and campaigned for Trump in 2016.
Bloomberg Law: “The Senate advanced the nomination of a federal district court nominee who campaigned against abortion and for President Donald Trump … Truncale campaigned for conservative positions in his unsuccessful Republican primary bid for a Texas congressional seat, in 2011 and 2012. He also volunteered for the Trump campaign in 2016.”
Politico: “Truncale called Obama an ‘un-American imposter’ in June 2011, and explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was ‘merely expressing frustration by what I perceived as a lack of overt patriotism on behalf of President Obama.’”
- Matthew Kacsmaryk: called being transgender “a delusion” and fought against rules to forbid discrimination in hospitals.
HuffPost: “Kacsmaryk called it ‘a grave mistake’ to include protections for lgbtq people in the Violence Against Women Act, and he signed a 2016 letter that called being transgender ‘a delusion.’”
Bloomberg Law: “Criticism of Kacsmaryk stems from a letter he signed onto opposing proposed hospital regulations forbidding discrimination on the bases of sexual orientation and gender identity in 2016.”