On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on whether to move the nominations of a long list of Biden judicial appointees to the Senate floor. Among them are some of the most radical nominees brought during the Biden Administration. The nominees highlighted below were renominated by the Administration after they were unable to secure their confirmation prior to the end of the 117th Congress.
Nancy Abudu - Eleventh Circuit
RNLA formally opposes the nomination of Nancy Abudu to the Eleventh Circuit. Last year, we sent a letter to Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin and then-Ranking Member Chuck Grassley to express our opposition:
We oppose Ms. Abudu’s nomination because her views are extreme and fall outside of the mainstream. RNLA has only formally opposed one other judicial nominee made by the Biden Administration. We oppose Ms. Abudu because her views and rhetoric go beyond that of even progressive activists, and we see no reason to believe that she will be an impartial judge on the “hot button” issue of election law. . .
RNLA prides itself on working for open fair and honest elections. RNLA has worked with liberals and conservatives toward this end. A key component of any such effort is a fair and impartial court system. Ms. Abudu has shown that she is not capable of impartiality and that her radical views are outside even the progressive mainstream on these issues. RNLA urges senators to oppose her nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for Eleventh Circuit.
When given the opportunity to comment on these matters, Abudu declined to be forthcoming with the members of the Committee.
Ms. Abudu is proud to work for the SPLC based on their work on racial justice issues. Yet, she still refuses to substantively comment on the organization's history of issues with racism in the leadership and their labeling of mainstream conservative groups as "hate groups."
— RNLA ⚖️ (@TheRepLawyer) April 27, 2022
Ms. Abudu is doing her best to sidestep questioning from @SenJohnKennedy on her opposition to voter ID laws in the past. The truth is that she has amounted voter ID laws to voter suppression in the past.
— RNLA ⚖️ (@TheRepLawyer) April 27, 2022
Ms. Abudu claims that her past comments equating the loss of felons’ voting rights to slavery were made as part of her role as a legal advocate, but @SenMikeLee points out that the comments were not made in a legal filing. You can read them here. ⬇️ https://t.co/PCvYKCIuPO
— RNLA ⚖️ (@TheRepLawyer) April 27, 2022
Dale Ho - Southern District of New York
Dale Ho is a career employee of the left's dark-money machine:
Ho comes straight from the ranks of liberal dark-money interests, for which he has worked for most of his career after graduating from law school. He spent over four years working at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and since 2013 has been at the ACLU, where he is the director of the its Voting Rights Project.
Ho is best known for fighting the Trump administration on its reinstatement of a question about citizenship on the census. The challenged policy was unremarkable — census authorities had been asking about citizenship status in one form or another for nearly 200 years — but Ho’s brief for the ACLU called it arbitrary and capricious. The Court did not agree, but did stymie the administration’s policy in a decision that politicized administrative law in an aberration from precedent.
For years, as he has supervised the ACLU’s election-law litigation, Ho has opposed basic measures to ensure integrity in voting, from voter ID measures to efforts to keep voter rolls up to date. In 2014, he made comparisons between such laws and the brazenly invidious racial discrimination in voting in the Deep South that occurred 50 years earlier. “Once again,” he asserted, “the nation’s promise that all Americans be able to vote free from undue burdens has gone unfulfilled.” Demagogic references to Jim Crow when discussing election laws has become standard fare on the far Left.
During Ho's confirmation hearing, Senator Mike Lee highlighted Ho's "open hostility and contempt for the Constitution":
WATCH: @SenMikeLee rips left-wing activist judicial nominee Dale Ho:
— JCN (@judicialnetwork) January 20, 2022
“But I don’t think it’s too much to ask that people we’ve been asked to confirm to a lifetime appointment as an Article III judge should not be expressing open hostility and contempt for Constitution." pic.twitter.com/jNJZFFTQxP
Nusrat Jahan Choudhury - Eastern District of New York
Nusrat Jahan Choudhury is known for her radical viewpoints on law enforcement and race:
Choudhury, an ACLU lawyer, has routinely talked about systemic racism in the criminal justice system. During a 2018 event at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, she argued the system is "premised on structural inequality."
"A lot of the racial animus that undergirded apartheid in America was shifted into the criminal justice system," she said, citing arguments made by "The New Jim Crow" author Michelle Alexander. "So the criminal justice system started doing the work of apartheid, which was criminalizing low-income Black and Latino people and keeping them down."
"And I think there’s a lot of evidence to support that thesis," she said at the time. "I see my work as hoping to transform the system."
Choudhury doubled down on her past remarks during her confirmation hearing:
Sen. John Kennedy: "Do you believe cops kill unarmed Black men in America every single day? You said it at Princeton."
— The Hill (@thehill) April 28, 2022
Judicial nominee Choudhury: "I said it in my role as an advocate to make a rhetorical point."
Sen. John Kennedy: "So when you say something incorrect it's ok?" pic.twitter.com/xF79I58jAo
Julie Rikelman - First Circuit
If confirmed, Julie Rikelman risks becoming the quintessential activist judge. As Carrie Severino highlighted, Rikelman is a major power player in "pro-choice" litigation:
Biden could not have nominated a litigator more central to the cause of advancing judicial activism on abortion than Rikelman. In fact, she argued the last two abortion cases that made their way to the Supreme Court: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and June Medical Services L.L.C. v. Russo (2020). According to the dark-money group Alliance for Justice, she was intimately involved in “all key aspects” of Dobbs. Biden’s choice is not tantamount to nominating Harry Blackmun, the justice who wrote the decision in Roe v. Wade, to a lower court. It is more like nominating Sarah Weddington, the attorney who argued for the prevailing side in Roe. . .
A gushing profile by CNN’s Ariane de Vogue and Betsy Klein describes “Biden’s move” as “an effort to bolster the bench with an expert on the issue at a time when more than half the states are prepared to ban if not further restrict the procedure.” “Expert” here is a euphemism for “activist.” And it reads eerily close to NARAL’s endorsement of Rikelman: “Having experts with demonstrable records of standing up for abortion rights like Julie Rikelman in the judicial branch will serve as a critical defense against future attacks on our rights.”
Abortion is not the only area that Rikelman has concerning viewpoints. During her confirmation hearing last year, Senator Tom Cotton questioned her on her radical viewpoints on crime:
WATCH:
— JCN (@judicialnetwork) September 27, 2022
Senator @TomCottonAR pressed Biden judicial nominee Julie Rikelman for her radical soft on crime stance:
“Do you still think it should be illegal to check a convicted rapist’s DNA to see if he’s, I don’t know, raped another woman or committed a murder?” pic.twitter.com/IQRyAR2bcu
The Judiciary Committee must vote no on these radical nominees.
Thursday's hearing can be watched here.