Not that it’s surprising, per se, that President Biden has chosen not to ask the ABA to rate his judicial nominees. After all, it’s barely a shell of its former legacy self, having lost most of its members and carrying no sway in the legal profession. But that wasn’t the reason Biden decided not to have his judicial nominees vetted. The contention is that the ABA is just too conservative to be fair to his “diverse” appointees.
Paige Herwig, who focuses on judicial nominations for the White House Counsel’s Office, said in an interview that the administration valued the bar group’s input before senators vote. But, she said, the White House also believes it will have a freer hand to consider a wide range of nominees if the group does not wield prenomination veto power.
“All of this is in service of one of our broadest goals — the diversification of the judiciary, in terms of making sure that we have considered the most talented nominees from a wide range of personal and professional life experiences,” she said.
The “wide range” of talented nominees sounds great, but what does that have to do with being found “not qualified” by the ABA? Indeed, it should be just the opposite, that the deeper the pool of candidates, the more qualified they would be. But then, is the range wider, the pool deeper, or is Biden swapping the deep pool for a puddle of alternate nominees?
People briefed on the call said White House officials raised concerns that the subjective criteria by which the group gathered impressions from peers of lawyers under consideration might be vulnerable to unintentional negative assumptions and racial or gender stereotyping.
This is the same ABA that has bent so far over in its effort to be woke that its been abandoned by lawyers as it became an adjunct to the Democratic Socialist party. This is the ABA that came up with the politically correct speech code of Rule 8.4(g) and tried to reinvent the model criminal code to redefine rape to be whatever a woman felt it was. Did they get the ABA confused with some rational organization?
During Mr. Obama’s presidency, the association’s vetting committee deemed candidates for judgeships “not qualified” at a more frequent rate than it objected to potential nominees under President Bill Clinton, Mr. Bush or Mr. Trump. By November 2011, it had objected to 14 of 185 candidates.
Most of those the group rejected were women or members of a minority group, frustrating Obama administration officials who had made it a goal to diversify the bench. Their identities did not become public because Mr. Obama did not nominate any of those who received negative ratings.
Without knowing who the nominees were or why they were deemed “not qualified,” it’s impossible discuss anything but the outcome. But if the ABA found them unqualified, and they were female or minority, there seems to be an extremely strong possibility that they were so grossly unqualified that not even the ABA’s overarching bias in favor of women and people of color was sufficient to overcome the incompetence. In other words, the problem wasn’t their race or gender, but that they were horrendously unqualified nominees for a life tenure position who, as it happened, were “diverse.” Want fewer unqualified nominees? Pick better nominees.
And feeding into this absurdity is Demand Justice‘s Christopher Klang, who worked in the Obama White House and might explain why the nominees were so grossly unqualified.
Christopher Kang, who worked on judicial nominations in the Obama White House and is now chief counsel of Demand Justice, a liberal advocacy group, praised the decision.
Sorry, Charlie, but they ain’t liberal. But I digress.
“Although well-intentioned, the A.B.A. Standing Committee is yet another corporate lawyer-dominated gatekeeper in the judicial selection process and must not be allowed to act as an obstacle to diversifying the bench,” he said
This is pure, unadulterated nonsense. There is no committee in law more dedicated to social justice. Granted, non-lawyers may not be aware of this, and Klang may get away with spewing garbage on social media and to Charlie Savage at the New York Times, but lawyers know better. And also know that Demand Justice has no qualms about spewing lies in furtherance of its goals.
One reason public defenders & civil rights lawyers were shut out from becoming judges in the past is because the American Bar Association, with its corporate tilt, acted as gatekeeper to past Democratic White Houses. Biden is saying goodbye to this system
If this wasn’t the problem, and as every lawyer knows this wasn’t the problem, what is the reason for throwing the ABA under the bus as “too corporate” for Biden?
In weighing professional competence, the bar association has traditionally placed a high value on whether the people who may become judges have experience with lawsuits and trials.
Advocates of diversifying the bench say that one concern is whether that standard can shrink the available pool of female and minority lawyers by disadvantaging those who chose other types of legal careers, like being a law professor or a government lawyer.
Well, yes, competence does tend to “shrink the available pool” to those who are competent. Yes, it does tend to “disadvantage” those who are incompetent. Never tried a case? You’re probably not particularly qualified to be a trial court judge because you don’t have a clue what you’re doing and you don’t get a job with life tenure that can destroy lives to figure out later whether you can learn or you just suck at it. You can’t respond to an objection with, “well, let me read a few law review articles and see what I should do.”
But this doesn’t smell right either, since criminal defense lawyers, including public defenders who are beloved at the moment because of their purity of not voluntarily defending heinous criminals they despise but being forced to do so, have courtroom and trial experience. Maybe PDs aren’t necessarily the right demographic, which means they aren’t part of Biden’s pool?
The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough potential diverse judicial nominees who are fully competent, which raises the specter of just who Biden plans to nominate and how utterly incompetent they must be that they can’t pass muster with the most woke committee possible.
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