The Senate Judiciary Committee has a packed agenda for February 7. It will be debating and voting on the critically important nomination of William Barr to be attorney general. By itself, that is enough to take up the entire meeting. However, also on the agenda for debate and consideration are 40 lifetime lower court judges (six circuit and 34 district), all part of the Trump administration and Republican Senate’s hyper-driven efforts to fill our courts with narrow-minded elitists who can be counted upon to favor corporate and Religious Right interests.

Many of these 40 nominees have records making them wholly unqualified for the bench, meriting opposition from People For the American Way and a vast number of other organizations. Below are the highlights (or lowlights) of the 15 most objectionable ones, with links to our letters of opposition:

Eric Miller

Nominated to the Ninth Circuit

• nominated over the objections of home-state Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell of Washington
• substantial litigation against the rights and sovereignty of Indian tribes
• opposed by National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), only the third time they have ever opposed a federal judicial nomination
• had committee hearing during congressional recess over the Democrats’ objection (which never happened in that committee until last year)

Eric Murphy

Nominated to the Sixth Circuit

• nominated over the objection of home-state Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio
• left private practice to become Ohio’s state solicitor (i.e., he chose his client for its legal positions, rather than the other way around)
• litigated against marriage equality in the historic Obergefell case
• defended Ohio’s disenfranchising voter purge system and helped persuade DOJ to reverse its position in that case from opposing the law to supporting it
• helped persuade the Trump administration to have the Justice Department reverse its position and support the voter purge in litigation
• defended Ohio’s law to defund Planned Parenthood
• submitted an amicus brief supporting Texas’s TRAP laws, which were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional

Chad Readler

Nominated to the Sixth Circuit

• nominated over the objection of home-state Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio
• left private practice to litigate the Trump agenda at the Justice Department (i.e., he chose his client for its legal positions, rather than the other way around)
• signed a legal brief for DOJ in 2018 arguing that the ACA’s protections for pre-existing conditions are unconstitutional; the brief was so dishonest, poorly reasoned, and antithetical to the rule of law that three career lawyers refused to sign their names to it

Allison Jones Rushing

Nominated to the Fourth Circuit

• had committee hearing during congressional recess over the Democrats’ objection (which never happened until last year)
• had a summer job in law school with the Alliance Defense Fund, one of the far Right’s leading organizations that virulently opposes LGBTQ equality (such as by linking gay people to sexual assault against children)
• has continued to support ADF by participating in its Blackstone Legal Fellowship, which helps mentor and advance like-minded right-wing lawyers
• fundamentally misunderstands the Establishment Clause and its supporters, calling them “delicate plaintiffs with eggshell sensitivities who claim deep offense at the acknowledgement of any beliefs that conflict with their own”

Paul Matey

Nominated to the Third Circuit

• nominated over the objection of home-state Senators Robert Menendez and Cory Booker of New Jersey
• senior aide to then-Gov. Chris Christie from 2010-2015, offering legal advice during a scandal-filled period that included Bridgegate, the use of Hurricane Sandy disaster relief funds for what was essentially a reelection commercial, and rewarding a major political donor with a $150 million no-bid contract

J. Campbell Barker

Nominated to the Eastern District of Texas

• left private practice to became Texas’s deputy solicitor general (i.e., he chose his client for its legal positions, rather than the other way around)
• defended Texas’s voter ID law that a judge found had been passed with the intent to discriminate
• litigated against DAPA
• defended Texas’s anti-choice TRAP laws
• challenged the legality of the EPA’s 2015 Clean Power Plan
• urged retrial of a man with an IQ of 51 who had been illegally imprisoned for 32 years after a court had overturned his conviction

Andrew Brasher

Nominated to the Middle District of Alabama

• left private practice to become Alabama’s deputy solicitor general and eventually solicitor general (i.e., he chose his client for its legal positions, rather than the other way around)
• defended a state law requiring proof of citizenship to vote, which the Supreme Court found unlawful
• defended a racial gerrymander that the Supreme Court subsequently struck down
• submitted an amicus brief in Obergefell v. Hodges claiming that same-sex couples seeking to marry fall outside the protection of the Equal Protection Clause
• defended Alabama’s TRAP laws and violated the integrity of the court system with fraudulent “expert” witnesses

Brian Buescher

Nominated to the District of Nebraska

• opposed to letting any woman to have an abortion unless needed to save her own life
• has said that federal courts should chip away at Roe v. Wade bit by bit

Stephen Clark

Nominated to the Eastern District of Missouri

• opposed the ACA’s contraception coverage requirement and cited widely recognized anti-choice frauds as experts in presenting misinformation to the court in an amicus brief for several anti-choice organizations
• was listed on Lawyers For Life newsletters comparing Roe v. Wade to the Dred Scott decision and stating that “Planned Parenthood is “the nation’s #1 institution for killing innocent life”
• claimed that “one of the next evolutions of same-sex marriage is polygamy” and misled the Judiciary Committee on the prevalence of polygamy litigation

Matthew Kacsmaryk

Nominated to the Northern District of Texas

• promoted the deceptive propaganda that conservative Christians are being persecuted
• opposed efforts to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination
• authored legal writings premised on denying the experiences and essentially the existence of LGBTQ people
• demeaned and mischaracterized supporters of 20^th-century divorce laws, LGBTQ equality, and abortion rights as seeking “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”

Howard Nielson

Nominated to the District of Utah

• wrote legal justifications for Bush-era mistreatment of suspected terrorists
• part of the politicized hiring scandal at the Bush Justice Department; DOJ’s inspector general said Nielson should never be allowed to work at any federal agency
• opposed marriage equality in court and argued that a gay judge should have been disqualified

Michael Truncale

Nominated to the Eastern District of Texas

• wrote that we need in-person voter ID laws because “voter fraud makes a mockery of our elections,” but admitted under oath that he had no research or personal experience to back up that claim
• called President Obama “an un-American imposter”
• said that Texas Democrat Wendy Davis’s “claim to fame is the fact that she wants to kill babies five months into term”

Wendy Vitter

Nominated to the Eastern District of Louisiana

• lied under oath about urging the distribution of widely-discredited, unscientific misinformation about abortion and contraception (such as that women using birth control pills are more likely to die a violent death, or that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer)
• refused to say that Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided
• opposed letting Syrian refugees resettle in Louisiana

Allen Winsor

Nominated to the Northern District of Florida

• left private practice to became Florida’s solicitor general (i.e., he chose his client for its legal positions, rather than the other way around)
• defended Florida’s extremely burdensome limitations on voting and registering to vote
• defended Florida’s medically unnecessary, burdensome waiting-period requirement before a woman can exercise her right to have an abortion
• defended the state’s ban on marriage equality
• supported a lethal injection regime that was likened to being burned alive
• opposed the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage requirement
• tried to prevent criminal defendants subject to the death penalty the right to demonstrate an intellectual disability if they score higher than 70 on an IQ test

Patrick Wyrick

Nominated to the Western District of Oklahoma

On Trump’s SCOTUS shortlist

• left private practice to became Oklahoma’s solicitor general (i.e., he chose his client for its legal positions, rather than the other way around)
• partnered with then-Gov. Scott Pruitt and industry to attack environmental protections
• defended extremely restrictive anti-choice laws that were struck down as plainly unconstitutional in very short opinions
• believes that the Constitution prohibits many if not most actions by federal agencies starting with the New Deal
• on Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees

Unfortunately, the factors that make these nominees unqualified are often the very reasons President Trump has nominated them, and why the GOP-controlled Senate has confirmed Trump’s previous judicial nominees at a record pace. American democracy cannot survive if our judicial branch is filled with narrow-minded elitists rather than principled, fair-minded constitutionalists.