The Left Panics As Lindsey Graham's Judiciary Committee Votes Out the "Monster Markup" Of Federal Judges

Thursday afternoon, the Senate Judiciary Committee headed by Lindsey Graham approved a slate of 44 judicial nominees for confirmation. This continues a fundamental reshaping of the the federal judiciary by the Trump administration with the assistance of the Federalist Society.

Here are the comparisons for numbers of POTUS judicial nominations as well as a breakdown of the diversity of Trump's appointments.

JK! They are disconcertingly homogeneous.#ShockingNotShocking pic.twitter.com/uEjVnYPFKs

— Jen Purtell (@JenPurtell) February 4, 2019

I usually wouldn’t ordinarily quote anything from Huffington Post’s news operation, but considering this person probably doesn’t have the ability to learn to code, I’d doing her a favor by giving her the click:

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to send 44 of Trump’s court picks to the Senate floor for a confirmation vote. That’s a huge number at once; progressive judicial advocacy groups dubbed the committee’s hearing a “monster markup.”
…
But Democrats and progressive groups aren’t just alarmed by the number of Trump’s picks sailing through. Many of these nominees have spent their careers attacking LGBTQ rights, abortion rights and voting rights, and now they’re on their way to holding lifetime seats on federal courts.

As Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) pointed out in Thursday’s hearing, more than 80 percent of Trump’s judicial nominees so far are members of the conservative Federalist Society. For some context, she noted that less than 4 percent of all American lawyers are members of that group.

“Month after month, we have seen a parade of these so-called conservative activists nominated to the federal courts,” Hirono said. “They have been groomed by conservative political ideologues. They want to see Roe v. Wade overturned or narrowed into oblivion, LGBT people permanently consigned to the margins of American life, and constitutional and civil rights encroached [based] on the religious preference of a vocal few.”

Sirens were blaring and red lights flashing across liberal organizations.

Hear is a sampling of the people they hate:

Allison Jones Rushing, nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit
The 37-year-old attorney was a legal intern at the Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified as a “hate group,” and mentored people through the organization’s controversial Blackstone Legal Fellowship program.

Eric D. Miller, nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit
The 43-year-old attorney has built a career out of fighting tribal interests and sovereignty, so much so that one Native American leader described Miller’s law firm, Perkins Coie, as the go-to destination for jurisdictions that want “to fight an Indian tribe.”

Matthew Kacsmaryk, nominee to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas
The 42-year-old lawyer wrote approvingly in a 2015 op-ed that “the Catechism holds that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,’ ‘contrary to the natural law,’ and ‘do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity.’” [Fact Check: True.]

Wendy Vitter, nominee to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana
The 58-year-old attorney is a vocal opponent of abortion rights who initially didn’t tell senators about her extreme comments on the topic.

“Planned Parenthood says they promote women’s health,” Vitter said in a May 2013 speech she gave in protest of a new clinic in New Orleans. “It is the saddest of ironies that they kill over 150,000 females a year. The first step in promoting women’s health is to let them live.”

Howard C. Nielson Jr., nominee to the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah
The 51-year-old lawyer fought for California’s short-lived ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, before it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013.

During the case, Nielson argued that sexual orientation is a choice and disputed the harmful effects of discrimination on LGBTQ people. When a U.S. district court ruled in 2010 that Prop 8 violated the Constitution, Nielson argued that then-Chief Judge Vaughn Walker should have recused himself from the case because he was gay and therefore, Nielson claimed, unable to be fair on the issue. He filed a motion contending that Walker “had a duty to disclose not only the facts concerning his [same-sex] relationship, but also his marriage intentions.” That motion was denied by another judge.

Patrick Wyrick, nominee to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma
The 37-year-old Oklahoma Supreme Court justice made limiting reproductive rights a top priority when he previously served as state solicitor general. In one case, he defended a law that would have required minors to obtain a prescription before buying emergency contraception. The law would have also forced adult women to prove their age before purchasing such contraception. The legislation was permanently blocked by a state judge in 2014.

There were more they hated but by this time the reporter had reached her word count and was a sodden, sobbing mass on the bathroom floor.

A lot of people voted for Trump for precisely this reason. And how often since the election have you heard “But Gorsuch” used as some kind of joke by NeverTrumpers as though replacing Scalia with a solid conservative was no small thing. For all of his faults, President Trump and his administration are breaking records in putting young conservatives, and in many of those cases orthodox Christians, on the bench where they can begin to reshape the way the federal judiciary has been bastardized.