It Is Not Going To End When Trump Is Kicked Out

Back in 2014, 2015 and 2016 I warned that it is not just the anti-LGBTQ+ laws that the Republicans are trying to pass but also the fact that they were trying to pass but also the fact that the Republican Senate refused to appoint any federal judges president Obama nominated including a Supreme Court justice. Well now they are packing the courts with lifetime evangelical Christian judges who are anti-civil rights, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-women.

The Senate Is Ready To Rubber-Stamp A Horde of Anti-Transgender Nominees
Go to the profile of National Center for Transgender Equality
With challenges to transgender rights in the military, health care, and education, defeating biased judges with extreme views is more important than ever.
Medium
By Gillian Branstetter National Center for Transgender Equality
February 7, 2019


Only 24 hours after the Supreme Court lifted several injunctions against his ban on transgender troops, President Donald Trump introduced 51 judicial nominees for lifetime appointments in federal courts. These nominees are repeats from last year — including Matthew Kascmaryk, who believes transgender people’s very existence is a “delusion.” It also features Allison Jones Rushing, who has spent her entire professional career fighting the rights of LGBTQ people. Worst of all, it includes Bill Barr — Trump’s controversial pick to replace Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and continue his anti-trans agenda.

Now, the Senate Judiciary Committee is getting ready to vote on all of these controversial nominees at once on Thursday.

On Tuesday, the committee held a hearing for another nominee expected to bring her extreme views to our nation’s legal system. Neomi Rao, Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, is alarming advocates and survivors of sexual assault alike with her past record of blaming rape victims for the violence they faced. Formerly the head of a chief regulatory office in the Trump administration, Rao also has a long record of deriding LGBTQ equality as “trendy” and not “normal” and approving some of Trump’s most notorious attacks against the rights and lives of transgender people and their families.

It is nothing but a blatant power grab the Republicans and their evangelical Christian to force their beliefs on us for generations to come.

As a recent New York Times investigation showed, the Trump administration has ignored basic rules for enacting many of these rules and repealing others introduced by the Obama administration. Rao, as head of the office charged with inspecting these rules, had personal oversight of each new rule and plainly disregarded the threat posed by the administration to LGBTQ people and their civil rights. If this is the judgment she would bring to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench, then we already know enough to find Rao deeply disqualified for the job.

Sadly yesterday straight down party lines all the nominations were voted out of committee.

Dozens of Judicial Nominees Advance to Full Senate
Courthouse News Service
By Tim Ryan
February 7, 2019


WASHINGTON (CN) – The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday advanced the nominations of 44 of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, resuming the efforts of the Republican-controlled Senate to stock the federal judiciary with Trump selections.

Of the 44 judges the committee approved on Wednesday, 19 received approval in the last Congress, but were not confirmed before the end of the year. As is Senate practice, all nominees who were not approved were sent back to the White House and Trump eventually chose to renominate many of them last month.

Among the 25 who received approval for the first time, six are up for seats on federal appeals courts, including two nominees each to the Sixth and Ninth Circuits, as well as one to the Third Circuit and one to the Fourth Circuit.
[…]
Rushing has only been practicing law since 2009, having joined the firm after clerking for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Rushing also clerked for then-10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch and D.C. Circuit Judge David Sentelle, spending a year at Williams Connolly as an associate before taking the clerkship with Thomas.
[…]
Eric Miller, who is up for a seat on the Ninth Circuit, also faced questions about his legal practice, which has included a number of cases in which he has gone against Native American tribes in court.

In the past the presidents’ nominees were approved by their state legislators but Trump is getting his some of his nominees’ recommendation from the libertarian Heritage Foundation that is funded in part by the Koch brothers and from Alliance Defending Freedom.

Miller, Third Circuit nominee Paul Matey and Sixth Circuit nominees Eric Murphy and Chad Readler were also the subject of controversy because their home-state senators have not signed off on their nominations.

Each of these nominees was approved in a 12-10 party-line vote.

Under the tradition known as the blue slip, both of a nominee’s home-state senators must give their consent before a nominee goes forward in the nomination process. The policy is enforced by the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and chairs have used it differently in different administrations.

Senator Lindsey Graham, the North Carolina Republican who now chairs the committee, has said he will continue the policy of his predecessor, Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and require the blue slip for federal district court nominees, but not for circuit court nominees so long as the White House at least consulted with the senators.

Be scared, be very scared these judges have a lifetime appointment and they are going to shape our rights and liberties for decades. You are going to see “religious freedom” applied to everything anti-LGBTQ+ and abortion rights but not to other areas like leaving water in the desert for undocumented immigrants because it is against their religion to let them die in the desert.