The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing today on the nomination of Kyle Duncan to a lifetime seat on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Duncan is one of several of Donald Trump’s judicial nominees who have been affiliated with conservative legal organizations that are working to remake American law to protect discrimination in the name of religious freedom.

The Religious Right has so far been thrilled with Trump’s nominations to the federal courts, in part with the hope that Trump’s judges will endorse the movement’s effort to rewrite the meaning of religious liberty. With Duncan and others, Trump is attempting to put representatives of this movement directly on the bench.

Duncan previously served as the general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. Matthew Kacsmaryk and Jeff Mateer, who have both worked for First Liberty Institute, are nominated to district court seats in Texas. As Sarah Posner notes in an in-depth profile of the Alliance Defending Freedom yesterday, Duncan and Mateer are also among the four Trump judicial nominees with ties to the behemoth conservative legal group, which has done more than any other to promote the radical reimagining of religious liberty.

Mateer’s nomination has gotten the most attention of these, given his comments about transgender children being part of “Satan’s plan,” his invocation of Nazi Germany in discussing the current treatment of conservative Christians in America, and his decision to speak at a conference that featured considerable discussion about the death penalty for gay people. But like Mateer, Duncan and Kasmaryk are poised to bring the ideology of the Religious Right, dressed up in the movement’s carefully calibrated talking points about religious liberty, into the federal courts.

Duncan worked for two years as the general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he led the litigation on behalf of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain that claimed that offering its female employees health care coverage for birth control would violate its religious liberty. Our affiliate PFAW Foundation adds:

Becket has also represented a handful of religious institutions challenging the contraception mandate under the Affordable Care Act, and attacking the Obama administration’s accommodation for those with religious objections. Becket clients argue that even informing the government of their objections is a substantial burden on their religious liberty because that act would trigger the accommodation mechanism that would provide women with contraceptive coverage through other means. Becket accuses the Obama administration of working to push people of faith “to the margins.”

Duncan also served as a member of Marco Rubio’s “religious liberty advisory board” in 2016.

Alliance for Justice notes in a report on Duncan that he has also authored briefs supporting Texas’ restrictions on abortion access and opposing marriage equality and has “repeatedly attacked the rights of same-sex couples attempting to adopt children.”

Kacsmaryk is currently the deputy general counsel at First Liberty Institute, another Religious Right legal group that has made a name for itself by arguing that conservative Christians are being persecuted at the hands of a secular government and advocates of reproductive freedom and LGBTQ rights.

Kacsmaryk appears to have been part of a meeting with Trump administration officials in July at which First Liberty lobbied for “broad” exemptions in contraception coverage rules. In a press release, Kacsmaryk said he was fighting against “the government’s effort to punish business owners and ministry leaders for following their religious beliefs and moral convictions.”

In his writings, Kacsmaryk presents a view of the world in which the products of the “sexual revolution” are up against America’s Christian foundation. AFJ describes his response to comparisons of the LGBTQ rights movement and the civil rights movement:

Kacsmaryk wrote that the civil rights movement “was rooted in the soil of the uniquely American Judeo-Christian tradition, spearheaded by Christian leaders, and was essentially ‘moderate’ in its demands.” In contrast, the “Sexual Revolution,” “was rooted in the soil of elitist postmodern philosophy, spearheaded by secular libertines, and was essentially ‘radical’ in its demands.”

In his work at First Liberty, AFJ reports, Kacsmaryk was categorically opposed to any nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people:

Indeed, Kacsmaryk appears to have opposed any effort to ensure equality for LGBTQ persons. For example, while at the First Liberty Institute, he opposed a rule clarifying that hospitals receiving Medicare and Medicaid cannot discriminate against patients based on sexual orientation and gender identity, opposed Department of Labor regulations clarifying that discrimination on the basis of gender identity was prohibited under the Workplace Innovation and Opportunity Act, opposed federal housing regulations to add gender identity to anti-discrimination provisions in community planning and development programs, opposed gender identity and sexual orientation nondiscrimination rules in the Affordable Care Act, and opposed nondiscrimination clauses in the Homeless Youth and Trafficking Prevention Act and the Violence Against Women Act 2013 reauthorization bill. Kacsmaryk and the First Liberty Institute also represented the owners of an Oregon bakery that denied services to a same-sex couple because of their sexual orientation.

As a sign of how extreme Kacsmaryk is, when Republicans and Democrats in Utah reached a compromise to prohibit employment and housing discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity with a broad exemption for religious organizations, Kacsmaryk opposed the bill. The bill was sponsored by Republicans, passed a Republican legislature, was signed by a Republican governor, and supported by countless religious groups. Moreover, its exemption was so broad that it was progressives who raised the most concerns with the bill (for example, writing “Utah ‘Compromise’ to Protect LGBT Citizens From Discrimination Is No Model for the Nation”). Significantly, Kacsmaryk did not oppose the bill on the grounds that the religious exemption was insufficient, or that it imposed too great a burden on religious persons. Rather, he opposed it on grounds that businesses and landlords should be able to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans[.]

The post The Movement To Remake ‘Religious Liberty’ Is Taking The Courts first appeared on Right Wing Watch.

The post Marjorie Dannenfelser: Confirm Trump Judges To Let States Defund Planned Parenthood first appeared on Right Wing Watch.

The White House today walked back the nominations of two of President Trump’s most controversial judicial nominees, Brett Talley, a 36-year-old with a record of online extremism who had never tried a case, and Jeff Mateer, a former attorney for a Religious Right legal group who had said that transgender children were part of “Satan’s plan.”

Talley, as we reported, had called for readers of his blog to join the NRA after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School and had written on Twitter that Hillary Clinton should be in jail, calling her “Hillary Rotten Clinton.” The outcry over Talley’s nomination to a district court seat in Alabama increased when the American Bar Association gave him a rare “unanimously not qualified” rating—which was no surprise, since he’s only actually practiced law for a couple of years and has never actually tried a case in court.

Mateer, a former attorney for the Religious Right legal group First Liberty Institute, was saddled with a record of public speeches and interviews in which he had said that transgender kids are part of “Satan’s plan,” warned that marriage equality would lead to “disgusting” new forms of marriage such as “people marrying their pets,” defended ex-gay conversion therapy, and questioned whether there’s a “right to homosexuality” in the 14th Amendment. On top of that, Mateer had spoken at a conference sponsored by radical anti-LGBTQ pastor Kevin Swanson, who was known for speaking about the death penalty for homosexuality.

People For the American Way included some lowlights in a video opposing Mateer’s nomination:

The writing seemed to be on the wall for Talley and Mateer yesterday when Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley urged the White House to drop their nominations.

While Talley and Mateer were two of the most colorfully controversial judicial nominees put forward by Trump, they were far from the only ones with extremist views or other disqualifications. Just yesterday, the Senate voted along party lines to confirm Steven Grasz, who had also earned a unanimous “not qualified” rating from the ABA, to a lifetime appeals court seat due to bias. The ABA was concerned that Grasz, who has a history of strident anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ activism, would be “unable to separate his role as an advocate from that of a judge.”

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved four controversial nominees, including Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, who while working in the Bush administration had opposed a proclamation praising efforts on behalf of women in the workforce, writing, “I resist the proclamation’s talk of ‘glass ceilings,’ pay equity (an allegation that some studies debunk), the need to place kids in the care of rented strangers, sexual discrimination/harassment, and the need generally for better ‘working conditions’ for women (read: more government).”

And just today, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the nomination of Mateer’s former First Liberty colleague, Matthew Kacsmaryk, who has used less controversial language to express many of the same sentiments, including lobbying the Trump administration to weaken the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate. Another veteran of the conservative movement’s attempt to walk back LGBTQ and reproductive rights in the name of religious liberty, former Hobby Lobby attorney Kyle Duncan, has also been nominated to a federal judgeship.

The post White House Withdraws Two Controversial Judicial Nominations first appeared on Right Wing Watch.

This post was originally published on the PFAW Blog.

The White House was right to withdraw the nominations of Brett Talley and Jeff Mateer to be district court judges. But their withdrawal does not mean that everyone else is acceptable. Other judicial nominees don’t get a pass just because they haven’t been caught on video calling trans kids satanic, or didn’t disclose that their marriage creates an enormous conflict of interest.

Make no mistake: Talley and Mateer are far from being the only spectacularly unqualified Trump judicial nominees currently under Senate consideration. In addition to Kyle Duncan and David Stras at the circuit level, several other district court nominees immediately come to mind, such as:

• Matthew Kacsmaryk, who is essentially Jeff Mateer without the video footage of his disturbing remarks;
• Damien Schiff, who called Justice Kennedy a “judicial prostitute” and likens affirmative action to slavery, Jim Crow, and concentration camps;
• Matthew Petersen, who is so bereft of experience that his “deer in the headlights” response to elementary questions is going viral;
• Thomas Farr, who participated in a notorious voter intimidation effort against African Americans and seems to have lied about it to the Judiciary Committee;
• Mark Norris, who has more respect for the KKK and the Confederacy than he does for Muslim refugees and the separation of powers.

Each of these nominees is scandalously unqualified for lifetime tenure on the federal bench.

Let’s start with Matthew Kacsmaryk, deputy general counsel at the stridently anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice First Liberty Institute (where Mateer was general counsel). He is essentially a clone of Mateer, without the video. He has opposed extending anti-discrimination protection to LGBTQ people in areas including labor rights, hospital patient rights, fair housing, and programs helping women under the Violence Against Women Act.

He works to transform religious liberty from a protective shield into a sword to harm others. In articles about the law that he has authored, he uses quotation marks around terms like “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” as if they are made-up concepts with no bearing on reality. His contempt for LGBTQ people goes so far that he uses quotation marks around the word marriage when used for same-sex couples, and even with the term LGBT. He has written that abortion rights and LGBTQ rights are based on:

the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.

Kacsmaryk rejects the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the right to abortion, the right to use contraception, and apparently the fundamental premise that it protects privacy at all. His legal views of privacy issues and LGBTQ equality (and even dignity) are at odds with the law and seem shaped by his personal views.

Kacsmaryk is hardly alone among pending Trump nominees in his animus against LGBTQ people. Damien Schiff, nominee for the Court of Federal Claims, opposed an anti-bullying program in an article entitled “Teaching Gayness.” As he told senators, he defined it as teaching about “the morality of physical intimacy by persons of the same sex.” He criticized portions of the anti-bullying program that presented what he called the “homosexual lifestyle,” telling senators he meant “the desire to engage in, and the engaging in, physically intimate activity with a person of the same sex.”

For Schiff, talking about Mommy and Daddy teaches kids about love and security and kindness, while teaching about Papa and Daddy teaches kids about sexual acts. Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are nothing more than sex animals, not full humans.

But wait, there’s more! Schiff compared the Supreme Court ruling upholding affirmative action as a historic mistake along the lines of Dred Scott (protecting slavery), Plessy v. Ferguson (permitting Jim Crow), and Korematsu (upholding concentration camps for Americans of Japanese ancestry).

He has written of his desire for a far-right Supreme Court that could “overturn precedents upon which many of the unconstitutional excrescences of the New Deal and Great Society eras depend.” And he has called Justice Anthony Kennedy a “judicial prostitute.”

Then there’s Matthew Petersen, who has been nominated to preside over district court litigation in Washington, DC. But he doesn’t have experience actually litigating cases in courts, federal or state. Nor does he have any experience serving as a judge at the state or local level. In his Judiciary Committee questionnaire, he admits that he has “not had occasion to appear in court” and has no experience “in court or directly litigating cases.”

At Petersen’s December 13 hearing, Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana asked a withering series of questions that would not have fazed a district court nominee before the Trump era. He went through a checklist of some of the most basic things a trial judge should know, drawing a blank (or an attempt to dissemble) from the nominee. Petersen knows nothing about the basics of the job, and he wants the Senate to give it to him anyway—with lifetime tenure, to boot. He and the president who nominated him must have a pretty low opinion of the United States Senate to think it would confirm him.

So, too, must North Carolina Eastern District nominee Thomas Farr, who—after party-line committee approval—was exposed as having likely lied to the senators about his participation in a notorious voter intimidation campaign in 1990 by then-Sen. Jesse Helms. The campaign sent 100,000 postcards to African-American voters, suggesting they weren’t eligible to vote and could be prosecuted if they tried. The Justice Department sued the campaign, which was represented by Farr. But the nominee assured the Judiciary Committee that he had not known about the scheme and had not been present when it was being planned.

Unfortunately for Farr—but fortunately for the U.S. Senate—a former DOJ attorney involved in the investigation remembers that Farr had in fact been in on the planning weeks before the cards were sent. Gerald Hebert has revealed his contemporaneous notes and identifies Farr as being part of the voter intimidation scheme. Despite requests from Democrats and progressive activists, Farr has not been called back to the committee to answer questions about the newly uncovered evidence. If Republicans have any concern for what is left of the Senate’s dignity, they will not rubber-stamp Farr and give him a lifetime appointment to a federal court.

Across the border in Tennessee is Mark Norris, nominee for the Western District. Norris has used his power and influence as Senate Majority Leader to deprive targeted communities of their rights. LGBTQ Tennesseans are well aware of Norris’ animus toward them. After the Obergefell marriage equality decision, he went so far as to intervene in a lesbian couple’s divorce to urge the judge not to treat them the same as an opposite-sex couple. Unintimidated, the judge rebuked Norris and his colleagues for their attempt to bypass the separation of powers.

Nor are LGBTQ people his only targets. When Memphis changed the name of three parks so they would no longer honor the Confederacy or the founder of the KKK, Norris supported a law to make it far more difficult to remove Confederate names and statues from public spaces. When already-vetted Syrian refugees came to America, Norris led an effort to keep them out of Tennessee, an effort that included posting online material linking the mostly Muslim refugees to ISIS terrorists.

Kacsmaryk, Schiff, Petersen, Farr, and Norris are all currently under consideration by the Senate for lifetime appointments to federal district courts. Their records are just as disqualifying today as they were a week ago, before Jeff Mateer and Brett Talley’s nominations were withdrawn.

The post After Mateer And Talley, Unacceptable Nominees Remain first appeared on Right Wing Watch.

The post The Year The Religious Right Moved Into The White House first appeared on Right Wing Watch.

This post originally appeared on the PFAW blog.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance a large number of nominees, six of whom People For the American Way has opposed as dangerously unqualified: Thomas Farr, Eric Dreiband, Mark Norris, Matthew Kacsmaryk, Kyle Duncan and David Stras. Five of these men (yes, they’re all men) have been nominated to lifetime positions on the federal bench. The sixth is an executive nominee to the Justice Department. All six have disturbing records, making concerns we have already raised about how this session continues Republican rubber-stamping of Trump nominees even more serious.

Thomas Farr (Eastern District of North Carolina)

Thomas Farr went into his hearing with a public record of hostility to African Americans’ voting rights. As if that weren’t bad enough, he gave a response to written questions from Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein about that record that was subsequently undermined by contemporaneous written evidence.

When GOP candidates and officials are taken to court for voter suppression, they turn to Farr to take their cases. He defended the state’s monster voter suppression law, which was struck down by the Fourth Circuit. The court found that the legislation was actually intended to make voting harder for African Americans, and that its provisions “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision.” He also defended racially gerrymandered congressional districts designed by his party, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional.

In 2016, when North Carolina stripped residents of the right to go to court when they are victims of unlawful discrimination, Farr expressed his personal support. Indeed, his career has been dedicated to undermining anti-discrimination laws, suppressing the vote, and weakening unions.

Especially concerning was his involvement in a notorious voter suppression effort by the Jesse Helms campaign in 1990. The campaign sent more than 100,000 postcards to mostly African-American voters, suggesting not only that they were not eligible to vote, but that they risked prosecution for voting. Farr worked with the campaign at a high level, but in his response to written questions, he assured senators that he had not known of the postcards until after they were sent.

Afterward, evidence arose seriously undermining that claim, showing he was at a “ballot security” planning meeting where the postcards were discussed. Rev. William Barber described this as “disturbing new information indicating that Farr misrepresented his past to the Committee and showing Farr’s connections to the worst elements of white supremacy.” Sen. Cory Booker wrote to Farr seeking an explanation. At today’s committee meeting, Booker noted that Farr’s response raised even more questions, and the senator requested a follow-up hearing to question Farr about the apparent discrepancy with his sworn testimony. However, Chairman Chuck Grassley refused, and the committee voted on a party-line basis to advance his nomination to the full Senate.

Thomas Farr has worked hard to disenfranchise people with roots in countries called “shitholes” by the president who wants to give him a lifetime position as a federal judge in the North Carolina district with the largest African American population.

Eric Dreiband (head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department)

President Trump’s nominee to lead the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is a startlingly inappropriate choice. Eric Dreiband has no experience with most issues the division addresses. He has no experience working on voting rights, hate crimes, police-community relations, religious discrimination, housing discrimination, civil rights in education, or disability rights. His expertise is in one area only—employment discrimination—but he has not worked to eradicate it. Instead, he long ago chose a career defending large corporations from their employees’ charges of unlawful discrimination. In his role as an advocate, he presents legal theories that help his clients but which would also make it far easier for employers to engage in discrimination.

In 2008, he appeared before Congress and testified in personal opposition to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which corrected the Supreme Court’s misinterpretation and narrowing of Title VII in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber. The bill Dreiband opposed eventually became law and restored women’s ability to have meaningful restitution for longtime pay discrimination that they had been unaware of.

In 2010, he provided the committee with personal testimony against the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act. This bill was introduced to counteract the Supreme Court’s imposing a higher burden of proof on older employees suing for discrimination in violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act than under Title VII.

Dreiband has routinely criticized the very laws he’d be in charge of enforcing. This prompted Sen. Leahy to observe before the committee vote that he “honestly couldn’t think of a more uniquely unqualified nominee to defend and enforce the core civil rights laws that codify the values of a just and tolerant society.”

Mark Norris (Western District of Tennessee)

As the Tennessee Senate’s Majority Leader for over a decade (and a member of that body since 2000) Mark Norris has made statements and advocated policies that have so loudly proclaimed certain people as outsiders in our society, that it is difficult to believe members of those communities could have confidence that they would stand as equals in his courtroom.

• He supported the successful effort to nullify a Memphis law prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ people.
• After the Obergefell marriage equality decision, Norris intervened in a lesbian couple’s divorce to urge the judge not to treat them as married for the purpose of child custody laws, an effort the judge recognized as an effort to violate the separation of powers.
• He helped make it harder to remove or rename monuments designed to promote white supremacy and instill fear in African Americans.
• He fought to prevent Syrian refugees from resettling in Tennessee and posted highly inflammatory material linking them to ISIS terrorists.

Mark Norris has an “us vs. them” worldview, and millions of people throughout Tennessee cannot help but be aware which side Norris puts them on.

Matthew Kacsmaryk (Northern District of Texas)

Matthew Kacsmaryk is the deputy general counsel at First Liberty Institute (FLI), a Religious Right legal group that opposes extending anti-discrimination protection to LGBTQ people in areas including labor rights, hospital patient rights, fair housing, and programs helping women under the Violence Against Women Act. All these and more clearly reflect a belief by Kacsmaryk that such deprivations are lawful.

He has a wildly distorted view of the decades-long movement to end legal restrictions on divorce, abortion rights, and LGBTQ equality. He portrays its leaders as “sexual libertines” acting on the basis of “elitist postmodern philosophy.” He has written that this movement has:

sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.

Passages such as these, or his use of quotation marks around terms like “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “LGBT” and “marriage” (when applied to same-sex couples) reveal a mindset that seems closed to the idea that LGBTQ people have any dignity or character.

Kyle Duncan (5^th Circuit Court of Appeals)

Kyle Duncan’s career demonstrates a commitment to depriving targeted groups of their basic rights and dignity. He has helped lead the far right’s efforts to transform religious liberty from a shield into a sword to dismantle laws that protect people from harmful discrimination. As general counsel of the Becket Fund and then founder of his own boutique law firm, he:

• represented Hobby Lobby in its fight to deny women employees legally required contraception health insurance coverage;
• argued that Texas TRAP law restrictions protect women, a position rejected by the Supreme Court, which struck down the laws as unconstitutional;
• helped defend North Carolina’s monster voter suppression law and a restrictive Texas voter ID law that a federal judge concluded had been adopted with the intent to discriminate; and
• misapprehends LGBTQ equality as a zero-sum struggle in which opponents’ rights are diminished when discrimination against LGBTQ people ends.

David Stras (8^th Circuit Court of Appeals)

Traditionally, the Judiciary Committee does not consider judicial nominees unless both home state senators have given their support for a hearing. Presidents usually engage in meaningful consultation with home state senators in order to find a consensus nominee. However, President Trump did not consult with Minnesota’s senators when he nominated David Stras to the Eighth Circuit. And in a sharp departure from tradition, chairman Chuck Grassley held a hearing for Stras even though he did not have the support of then-Sen. Al Franken. And today, Grassley set a vote on Stras even though Minnesota’s new senator, Sen. Tina Smith, did not even receive a blue slip or get consulted on his nomination.

Stras appeared on then-candidate Donald Trump’s initial list of 11 potential Supreme Court nominees, a list created and handed to him by the far right Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation. That alone raises extremely serious concerns about his respect for the values of equality and justice for all. (See: Neil Gorsuch)

All six nominees received the unanimous support of Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. All six will face significant opposition from Democrats on the Senate floor.

The post Judiciary Committee Advances Jesse Helms’ Lawyer & Other Nominees With Terrible Civil Rights Records first appeared on Right Wing Watch.

The post Mat Staver: ‘Literally We Are A Few Months Away’ From Ensuring End Of Roe & Obergefell first appeared on Right Wing Watch.