You must vote DEMOCRAT🐴 🔵 for ONE single reason; The GOP make WHITE ONLY COURTS 👨🏼‍⚖️ for 40+ YEARS

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Biden moves quickly to make his mark on federal courts after Trump’s record judicial nominations

President Biden’s top advisers have spent months building an extensive pipeline of judicial nominees to fill court vacancies throughout the country, attempting to swiftly remake portions of the judiciary and undo one of his predecessor’s most significant achievements.

President Donald Trump dramatically reshaped the courts over his four-year term with a record pace of nominations, and now Biden — who took part in hundreds of confirmations as the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee — is eager to leave his mark with nominees of his own.

More than a third of judges nationwide serving on federal appeals courts one level below the Supreme Court are eligible to step back from active service. With Democrats narrowly controlling the Senate — and with the prospect that they could lose control during the 2022 midterms — Biden intends to move quickly to fill openings that arise on courts affecting significant policies, including environmental regulations, gun laws and immigration.

The fledgling administration already has at least five circuit court openings to fill. More are expected soon as a wave of retirements or judges taking lighter caseloads comes through, including from those who stayed active through Trump’s tenure to avoid having him name their successors.

Top officials in the Biden administration say they are placing far more emphasis on judicial nominations and plan to fill slots faster than Democrats have in the past. At the Supreme Court, the administration could face the retirement of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, 82, a potential vacancy Biden has vowed to fill with a Black woman. And even as Biden signs a burst of executive orders and presses for a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, senior administration officials view judicial nominees as one area where the president will invest early political capital.

“People are approaching this with a different sense of urgency,” said senior White House counsel Paige Herwig, a former Senate staffer who was associate counsel to President Barack Obama and is leading the new administration’s effort. “And they understand. They saw what the Trump administration did for four years.”

The Obama administration was often criticized for not prioritizing nominations, and Trump successfully installed more than 200 judges working with Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), who mostly made good on his promise to “leave no vacancy behind.”

The new administration will take a page from the Trump White House and speed up the process by forgoing the American Bar Association review of candidates in advance of formal nominations.

Biden served 14 years as the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he and his top advisers have a deep understanding of the importance of the lifetime appointments and the need to move swiftly. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain helped oversee nominations for Biden as chief counsel on the committee as well as in the Bill Clinton White House. Vice President Harris comes from a legal background and was on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“We have a president who has had the issue of judges and filling vacancies as part of his career for decades,” said former senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who served with Biden on the Judiciary Committee and now leads the American Constitution Society, one of the interest groups recommending nominees for the bench. “I know he cares about it.”

Judges eligible to create appeals court vacancies for Biden to fill

Judges become eligible to take a lighter caseload known as “senior status” through of a combination of their age — at least 65 — and years of service on the bench. Of the more than 60 judges eligible, more than half were nominated by Democratic presidents, according to Federal Judicial Center data analyzed and tracked by Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution.

Legal observers expect this pool of judges to lead the way in announcing plans to step back from active service.

The former chief of the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, Judge Robert A. Katzmann, dated his retirement letter on Biden’s first day in the White House. Katzmann, a Clinton nominee, will continue to serve as a senior judge while teaching at the New York University School of Law. Judge Denny Chin, an Obama nominee on the same court, will take senior status in June. And Judge Carlos F. Lucero, a Clinton nominee on the Denver-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, announced his plans to step back effective Feb. 1.

At the district court level, more than a dozen judges nominated by presidents of both parties announced plans to retire or take senior status in Biden’s first week on the job, and there are more than 60 current or announced trial-court openings.

“Lots of Democratic appointees have deferred going senior or retiring because Trump was president,” said Ed Whelan, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center and a close observer of the courts. “If you’re a Democratic appointee disinclined to have a Republican replace you, you were even less inclined to have Donald Trump replace you.”

Slim window to act
The Biden administration got an early reminder of the importance of the courts when it comes to enacting policy. A federal judge in Texas, nominated by Trump, blocked Biden’s 100-day deportation “pause” last week in a challenge brought by the state’s Republican attorney general.

Ahead of the 2020 election, judges nominated by Trump were more likely to rule against efforts to loosen voting rules amid the coronavirus pandemic and side with Republicans seeking to enforce restrictions.

When Trump took office in 2017, there were 17 openings to fill on the 13 regional circuit courts, in part because the Republican-controlled Senate had slowed the confirmation process during Obama’s final two years. In four years, Trump successfully nominated a record number of young, conservative judges — 30 percent of the appeals court bench, with 54 judges and three Supreme Court justices.

He was able to accomplish more in four years than Obama — who had 55 circuit judges appointed and two Supreme Court justices — did in eight.

Even before Biden was sworn in last month, incoming White House legal counsel Dana Remus asked senators to immediately prepare to send recommendations for candidates to serve as trial-court judges in their home states. Remus emphasized the need to submit names within 45 days of a new vacancy being announced and the administration’s interest in nominees from diverse personal and professional backgrounds.

During the Obama administration there was emphasis on creating historic firsts, with the first openly gay federal appeals judge, for example. Some districts got their first female judge or first Black judge.

Trump appointed more White and male judges
In contrast, 84 percent of Trump’s nominees were White, compared with 64 percent of those tapped by Obama. Twenty-four percent of Trump’s picks were women, compared with 42 percent of those Obama nominated, according to data compiled by the American Constitution Society, one of the groups trying to increase diversity on the bench.

Biden’s team is also placing a priority on varied professional experience, not just encouraging prosecutors or nominees from prominent law firms but putting a call out for public defenders and civil rights attorneys, “and those who represent Americans in every walk of life,” Remus wrote in a December letter to senators, first reported by HuffPost.

Before Democrats secured a slim Senate majority in January, there were questions about whether McConnell, had he remained majority leader, would stymie Biden’s nominations. But because Democrats now control the floor schedule, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) will be able to follow McConnell’s blueprint to tee up an assembly line of lower-court judicial nominees and quickly move nominees to a confirmation vote. Appeals court nominees — and those nominated to the Supreme Court — will still have to go through lengthier 30 hours of debate after a preliminary vote.

“All of these judges care deeply about their courts and the administration of justice” and would not have wanted to leave the bench shorthanded with nominations possibly held up in the Senate, said Christopher Kang, chief counsel of Demand Justice, one of the liberal interest groups recommending nominees.

But with Democrats in control, Kang said, “now we’re in a place where nominations can move more quickly.”

Unlike in the Obama administration, the Biden White House will not review potential nominees in advance through the bar association. The new administration will consult with the ABA, among others, but the rating of candidates will come after the formal nomination, according to a Biden official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal process for nominations.

While the 2022 electoral map favors Democrats hoping to preserve their majority — Democrats are defending 14 seats while Republicans will have to defend 20 — midterm elections can be inhospitable to an incumbent president’s party. That gives Democrats another reason to act quickly.

Influential vacancies
Trump and his former White House counsel Donald McGahn drew heavily from a list of nominees assembled by the Federalist Society. Biden’s team is fielding recommendations from a broader constellation of interest groups, which might make filling vacancies more complicated.

White House officials have been conscious of balancing the desires of several Democratic interest groups, while attempting to keep the party united and use judicial nominations as a rallying point, in the same way they have motivated Republican voters for decades.

For many Democrats the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — whose seat Trump filled just before the election — elevated not only the importance of prioritizing the courts but the timing of vacancies.

Biden is also planning to soon form a bipartisan commission to within 180 days propose changes for the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. Among the ideas the commission could study are expanding the Supreme Court and requiring term limits for federal judges.

One of Biden’s first nominees is likely to fill the anticipated vacancy created on the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by his nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to serve as attorney general. Garland was already eligible to take senior status, along with three other judges on the D.C. Circuit: David Tatel, Judith Rogers and Karen LeCraft Henderson.

The composition of the appeals courts, which typically handle cases sitting with three judges, matters. A full complement of D.C. Circuit judges handled recent high-profile cases allowing a judge to scrutinize the Trump administration’s decision to drop its prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Trump’s efforts to shield his tax returns from congressional investigators.

The wave of retirements could have a major impact at the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, where one-third of the 15 judges are Democratic nominees eligible for senior status. Among them is Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, perhaps the most influential member of the court. Motz often writes for the majority, as she did when a divided full court revived one of the lawsuits alleging Trump was illegally profiting from foreign and state government payments to his hotel in downtown Washington.

On the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, nine of the 29 judges are Clinton nominees eligible to step back from active service. Trump reshaped the court by installing 10 judges on the traditionally liberal bench.

Exactly how many openings Biden has to fill will depend in large part on the highly personal decision of individual judges weighing whether to take senior status. There are incentives and drawbacks. Senior judges continue to hear cases, just a smaller number, and still receive their full salary, but without limits on income from teaching, for instance.

But senior judges can no longer sit when the full court rehears panel decisions unless they were part of the initial three-judge ruling. The loss in status also typically affects which opinions they get to write and sometimes the location of their judicial chambers — a judge’s de facto law office.

And there is no question that the timing of the decision matters in the minds of many judges who want a president of their own party to pick their successor and who may have been hesitating the past four years.

“We are seeing quite a few vacancies arise now, but I think that they will be staggered overall, in part because judges are sensitive to how these changes affect their circuit,” said Marin K. Levy, a Duke University School of Law professor who published a recent paper on incentives for taking senior status. “I expect that there will be more to come in the spring and summer months.”

J. Michael Luttig, a former judge on the 4th Circuit, said that for judges considering retirement, the party of the president who names their successor is a “significant consideration,” but not the only consideration.

Luttig was tapped by President George H.W. Bush and stepped down while George W. Bush was in the White House to serve as general counsel of Boeing. Luttig, who was a shortlist Bush candidate for the Supreme Court during the second Bush administration, said it would not have made a difference had the president naming his successor been a Democrat.

“I don’t believe any judge makes his or her decision exclusively on that basis,” Luttig said. “Judges are going to retire or not based primarily on personal considerations.”

 

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yall keep thinking this is a game...
Federal judge rules eviction moratorium is unconstitutional

 

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Federal judge rules eviction moratorium is unconstitutional

We warned you not to sit on your ass in 2016...and Trump elected all these damn right wing judges in their 30s and 40s to serve for the next few decades...

Watch....

This is why you can NEVER let up or cede ground and you must ALWAYS inch forward no matter how imperfect the judge. Republicans even get on code even if they hated Trump, they USED Trump to their advantage.

ill never forget so many of you for letting this happen

 

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VOTING MATTERS

NPR Cookie Consent and Choices
Chauvin Trial: Judge Reinstates 3rd-Degree Murder Charge Over George Floyd's Killing
Bill ChappellMarch 11, 20219:45 AM ET

Derek Chauvin will face a third-degree murder charge in the death of George Floyd, after a district court judge reversed his earlier ruling on Thursday.

MPR News/Screenshot by NPR
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin will face an additional charge of third-degree murder, Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill ruled on Thursday, after an appeals court ordered Cahill to reconsider his earlier decision to dismiss the charge.

"The court is going to grant the motion to reinstate" the charge, Cahill said as he announced his decision.

The ruling came as a third day of jury selection was set to begin in the trial over the killing of George Floyd. Chauvin was already facing manslaughter and second-degree murder charges when the much-anticipated trial opened this week.

Chauvin's defense team had sought to block the additional murder charge, but the Minnesota Supreme Court denied the request for review, in a decision that was issued Wednesday afternoon.

Last Friday, the Court of Appeals ordered Cahill to reexamine the third-degree charge based on the precedent set by a recent appeals court ruling. The judge had initially found that ruling, in the case of former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor, was not a precedent for the Chauvin case.

On Thursday, Cahill said he now agrees with the higher court, and that its precedent takes effect immediately.

"I feel bound by that," the judge said, "and I feel it would be an abuse of discretion not to grant the [prosecution's] motion."

Noor was found guilty of third-degree murder in the killing of a woman outside her home. Prosecutors argued that the appeals court's ruling in that case supports the charge against Chauvin.

Chauvin's attorney, Eric Nelson, argued in court Thursday that the cases are different. At one point, he noted that in the Noor case, the officer had clearly put other people at risk when, seated in a car, he leaned over and fired his weapon through his partner's window.

When Cahill threw out the third-degree murder charge last fall, he ruled that prosecutors could not show probable cause that Chauvin's actions had placed people other than Floyd at risk. But he said the recent appeals court ruling changes the standard.

"Even though they are factually different, I have to follow the rule that the Court of Appeals has put in place," Cahill said, "specifically that murder in the third degree applies even if the person's intent and acts are directed at a single person."

Rights activists are also keeping the Noor case in mind as they watch the Chauvin case, because of the reversal of races: Noor is Black and the woman he killed was white; Chauvin is white and Floyd was Black.

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruled last June that George Floyd's death was a homicide, saying that his heart and lungs stopped functioning "while being restrained."

The autopsy report cited neck compression – Chauvin was seen holding his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes – but it also noted "other significant conditions," including fentanyl intoxication, recent methamphetamine use, and signs of heart disease.

Floyd's death inflamed nationwide protests that quickly spread around the world, as people expressed outrage over the dramatic video in which Chauvin is seen pinning Floyd to the asphalt.

"Please, please. I can't breathe," Floyd repeatedly said before he died.

Five jurors are now seated for the trial, as the court works to select 12 jurors and two alternates. When they're chosen, jurors are told to report back to the courthouse on March 29, when opening statements are scheduled to begin.

Three other former Minneapolis officers who were at the scene — Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas K. Lane — face charges of aiding and abetting murder. They were fired along with Chauvin one day after Floyd was killed, and they were arrested several days later.

Judge reinstates 3rd-degree murder charge against Derek Chauvin in death of George Floyd


Judge reinstates 3rd-degree murder charge against Derek Chauvin in death of George Floyd
Chauvin also is facing second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

ByBill Hutchinson
March 11, 2021, 3:26 PM

The judge presiding over the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd has reinstated a third-degree murder charge in the case after the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that the application of the count in another civilian death involving a Minneapolis police officer established precedent.

Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill, who dismissed the third-degree murder charge in October, granted the motion by prosecutors to reinstate the charge after hearing arguments from both sides of the case.

Cahill's decision hinged on a recent appellate court decision upholding a third-degree murder conviction against former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor in the 2017 fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk Damondafter she called 911 to report an assault in progress near her home.

"With regard to the state's motion to reinstate, the court is going to grant the motion," Cahill said before the third day of jury deliberations began.

Cahill said that he initially disagreed with the appellate court's decision in the Noor case.

Prior to the Feb. 1 Appeals Court decision in the Noor case, a third-degree murder charge in Minnesota only applied if the defendant's actions endangered more than one person.

Chauvin's attorney's filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to review the appellate decision, contending it did not apply to Chauvin's case because the former officer is accused of targeting only Floyd. The petition prompted prosecutors in the case to ask the appeals court to halt jury selection, contending Cahill did not have total jurisdiction as long as Supreme Court was considering Chauvin's request.

Despite the petition from prosecutors on Monday to stay the trial, Cahill ruled that he was moving on with jury selection until the appeals court told him otherwise, which it never did.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected Chauvin's petition, putting the decision on the third-degree murder count back on Cahill.

"The court of appeals has said in a precedential opinion specifying the single-person rule applies to third-degree murder. I feel bound by that and I feel it would be an abuse of discretion not to grant the motion," Cahill said.

Prior to the ruling, Chauvin's lawyer, Eric Nelson, presented an unsuccessful last-ditch argument on why he believed the third-degree murder should not be reinstated. Nelson contended that the Noor case was procedurally and factually different than the Chauvin case.

"If you look at the facts of Noor, it's a Minneapolis police officer. This is a case involving a former Minneapolis police officer and that's about where the similarities end," Nelson said.

He said Noor was inside a patrol car with his partner and fired a gun across his partner's chest at a silhouette outside the vehicle that turned out to be Ruszczyk Damond, an "inherently dangerous" action that jeopardized anyone in the line of fire, including a bicyclist who was riding by at the time. He cited other cases to support his argument, saying they all include some form of instrumentality, whether it be a gun or a vehicle used to run someone over.

"Factually, there is no instrumentality here other than arguably Mr. Chauvin's knee," Nelson said.

He argued the cases are also procedurally different because Noor's appeal was filed after his conviction, and the Cauvin case is still in a pre-trial phase.

The prosecution's key evidence in the case against Chauvin is a bystander video of the May 25 arrest in which Chauvin, who is white, is seen kneeling on the back of Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes as the handcuffed and prone Black man repeatedly cried out, "I can't breathe."

Attorneys Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci, who represent the Floyd family, applauded Cahill's decision.

"We're gratified that the judge cleared the way for the trial to proceed and for Chauvin to face this additional charge," Crump and Romanucci said in a statement. "The trial is very painful and the family needs closure. We're pleased that all judicial avenues are being explored and that the trial will move forward."

The circumstances of Floyd's death prompted weeks of protests in Minneapolis and across the nation, some of which were accompanied by violent clashes against police, looting and vandalism of businesses.

Like many people across the country, President Joe Biden is closely monitoring the Chauvin trial, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Thursday. She said Biden has no intention of weighing in on the criminal case, but added the president has previously spoken about racial justice and his support of police reform.

"He's watching it closely, as are many members of the administration," Psaki said.

Chauvin is being tried separately from three other former officers involved in Floyd's death. J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao are charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter and are scheduled to go on trial in August. All three have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

After the issue of the third-degree murder was settled, jury selection resumed, with the sixth juror seated on Thursday.

The latest member added to the panel is a man who works as a route driver, who described himself as Real Madrid soccer fan who enjoys true crime podcasts. He said it was "mind-blowing" to receive a jury summons in such a big case.

Attorneys said they're looking to select 14 jurors for the case, including two alternates.

ABC News' Whitney Lloyd contributed to this report.

 

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In bitterly divided election, opponents of anti-racism education win big in affluent Texas town
In bitterly divided election in Southlake, Texas, opponents of anti-racism education win big
May 2, 2021, 7:07 PM EDT
SOUTHLAKE, Texas — Nine months after officials in the affluent Carroll Independent School District introduced a proposal to combat racial and cultural intolerance in schools, voters delivered a resounding victory Saturday to a slate of school board and City Council candidates who opposed the plan.

In an unusually bitter campaign that echoed a growing national divide over how to address issues of race, gender and sexuality in schools, candidates in the city of Southlake were split between two camps: those who supported new diversity and inclusion training requirements for Carroll students and teachers and those backed by a political action committee that was formed last year to defeat the plan.

On one side, progressives argued that curriculum and disciplinary changes were needed to make all children feel safe and welcome in Carroll, a mostly white but quickly diversifying school district. On the other, conservatives in Southlake rejected the school diversity plan as an effort to indoctrinate students with a far-left ideology that, according to some, would institutionalize discrimination against white children and those with conservative Christian values.

Candidates and voters on both sides described the election as a "fork in the road" for Southlake, a wealthy suburb 30 miles northwest of Dallas. "So goes Southlake," a local conservative commentator warned in the weeks leading up to the election, "so goes the rest of America."

In the end, the contest was not close. Candidates backed by the conservative Southlake Families PAC, which has raised more than $200,000 since last summer, won every race by about 70 percent to 30 percent, including those for two school board positions, two City Council seats and mayor. More than 9,000 voters cast ballots, three times as many as in similar contests in the past.

An election in Southlake, Texas, had unusually high turnout Saturday as a fight over a school diversity plan divided the town. Nitashia Johnson / for NBC News
Hannah Smith, a prominent Southlake lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, defeated Ed Hernandez, a business consultant, to win a seat on the Carroll school board. In a statement to NBC News on Sunday, Smith, who is white, said the election "was a referendum on those who put personal politics and divisive philosophies ahead of Carroll ISD students and families, and their common American heritage and Texas values."

"The voters have come together in record-breaking numbers to restore unity," Smith said. "By a landslide vote, they don't want racially divisive critical race theory taught to their children or forced on their teachers. Voters agreed with my positive vision of our community and its future."

Hernandez and other candidates running in support of new diversity and inclusion programs said they were not particularly surprised by the outcome in a historically conservative city where about two-thirds of voters backed President Donald Trump last year, but they were dismayed by the margin of their defeat.

School board candidate Ed Hernandez embraces his wife, Jennifer, after learning of his defeat in Southlake's municipal election Saturday. Nitashia Johnson / for NBC News
Hernandez, an immigrant from Mexico, said he worries about the signal the outcome sends to dozens of Carroll high school students and recent graduates who came forward with stories about racist and anti-gay bullying over the past two years. To demonstrate the need for change, members of the student-led Southlake Anti-Racism Coalition collected more than 300 accounts from current and former Carroll students last year who said they had been mistreated because of their race, religion or sexual orientation.

"I don't want to think about all these kids that shared their stories, their testimonies," Hernandez said, growing emotional Saturday moments after having learned the election results. "I don't want to think about that right now, because it's really, really hard for me. I feel really bad for all those kids, every single one of them that shared a story. I don't have any words for them."

The fight in Southlake dates to the fall of 2018, when a video of white Carroll high school students chanting the N-word went viral, making national headlines. In the aftermath, school leaders hosted listening sessions with students and parents and appointed a committee of 63 community volunteers to come up with a plan to make Carroll more welcoming for students from diverse backgrounds.


The effort was, in part, a recognition of changing demographics. Southlake's population has tripled to more than 31,000 over the past three decades, driven in part by immigrants from South Asia drawn to the area by high-paying jobs and highly ranked schools. Black residents make up less than 2 percent of the population in a city where the median household income is more than $230,000 and 74 percent of residents are white.

The result of the school diversity committee's work, a 34-page document called the Cultural Competency Action Plan, was released last summer, in the midst of a pandemic, a heated presidential election and a broader national reckoning over racism following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

The plan called for mandatory cultural sensitivity training for all Carroll students and teachers, a formal process to report and track incidents of racist bullying and changes to the code of conduct to hold students accountable for acts of discrimination. The proposal also suggested creating the position of director of equity and inclusion to oversee the district's efforts.

The plan was met with swift and fierce opposition. For months, conservative parents packed school board meetings, decrying aspects of the proposal that they said would have created "diversity police" and amounted to "reverse racism." Members of the Southlake Families PAC, which was formed within days of the plan's release, took particular issue with a district proposal to track incidents of microaggressions — subtle, indirect and sometimes unintentional incidents of discrimination.

At a board meeting, a white father said he supported introducing children to different cultures but argued that the district's plan would instead teach students "how to be a victim" and force them to adopt "a liberal ideology." Several parents said the plan would infringe on their Christian values by teaching children about issues affecting gay and transgender classmates. Others warned that the board had awakened Southlake's "silent majority."

Southlake Families PAC backed a mother's lawsuit against the district and in December won a temporary restraining order that put the diversity plan on hold. Then, last month, two members of the school board who had supported the plan were indicted by a Tarrant County grand jury, which accused them of having violated the Texas open meetings law, a misdemeanor, after opponents of the diversity plan obtained texts showing that the members had messaged one another before they voted on it.

The issue became the defining theme of Southlake's typically low-key municipal elections this spring, dividing neighbors and former friends. The Tarrant County Democratic Party briefly posted and then deleted an image on social medialabeling all of the candidates who opposed the diversity plan as "racist." Southlake Families PAC, meanwhile, sent out mailers accusing the pro-diversity plan candidates of pushing for "radical socialism" in Southlake.

The acrimony landed the city in the national spotlight ahead of Election Day, with a flurry of stories appearing on right-wing news sites describing the contest as a test for a bigger national fight over anti-racism programs in schools.

"This is happening everywhere," Fox News host Tucker Carlson said during a segment Tuesday about Carroll's diversity plan and the resulting blowback. "They'll come in, they'll wreck your school, they'll hurt your children, they'll take your money, they'll bully you, and no one does anything. And I'm just so grateful to hear of parents who are doing something."

As a steady stream of Southlake voters headed to cast ballots at Town Hall on Saturday, many described the vote's significance. "It's a great town," a woman shouted over her shoulder after declining to speak to reporters. "I want to keep it that way."

Jason Rudman, a white father of two who voted for the conservative slate of candidates, said he was disappointed by the political discourse in town.

"What's most important to me is that we have dialogue," said Rudman, whose children attend private school. "I don't feel like we're at a place right now where either side is talking to the other side. I feel like people are lobbing grenades back and forth, and to me, that's the most important thing that needs to be dealt with."

At the Cambria Hotel, where pro-diversity plan candidates and their supporters gathered Saturday, the election results party turned somber shortly after 7 p.m. as news of the outcome swept through the room. In the race for mayor, conservative John Huffman won 71 percent of the vote to defeat Debra Edmondson. Huffman, who criticized the diversity plan while serving on the Southlake City Council, did not respond to a message requesting comment.

Supporters of Southlake school board and City Council candidates who advocated for a school diversity plan made a last push for votes Saturday. Nitashia Johnson / for NBC News
Jennifer Hough, a white mother of two Carroll students who campaigned in support of the diversity proposal, said she was angry and heartbroken.

"Because it feels like hate wins," Hough said. "Like I said, we'll get mad, and then we'll regroup and we'll figure out where we go now. The town is changing. More people are moving in. So it's not going to be like this forever."

Meanwhile, student members of the Southlake Anti-Racism Coalition, which was organized last year to demand changes at Carroll, said they were upset by the results but determined to keep pushing for change.

"I'm not surprised, but I'm disturbed," said Nikki Olaleye, a Black 12th grade student at Carroll Senior High School, who has been an outspoken critic of the school system's handling of racist and anti-gay bullying. "I don't think that this is time to be throwing a pity party. We are just ready to keep moving forward and doing what we can, using our voices."

 

[DEAD7]

I don’t think the court ruled incorrectly...The state needs to just foot the Bill for the unpaid rent

 

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[DEAD7]

 

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Republicans stopping Biden from positioning her as first black woman on scotus

 

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esquire.com
Inside the Conservative Movement's Long Con to Capture the Courts

By Jackie Calmes
18-23 minutes
Trump’s 226 appointments to the trial, appellate, and Supreme courts will stand as one of his foremost legacies, and all but certainly his most enduring: some appointees, mostly young and with life tenure, will be on the bench late into the twenty-first century. Were Barrett to serve until her late eighties as Ginsburg did, she would be on the court until about 2060; Kavanaugh and Gorsuch could be there past 2050. Trump’s three justices in a single term are one more than Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton each named over two terms. He appointed fifty-four judges to the circuit courts—which are the final word on the overwhelming share of appeals, since the high court accepts few—just one less than Obama over eight years. When Trump left office, his picks comprised one-third of the Supreme Court, 30 percent of the thirteen circuit courts, and more than one-quarter of the judges at the nation’s ninety-four district courts. Like Trump’s administration and the Republican Party, his appointees are not a diverse group. Seventy-six percent are male (compared to 58 percent for Obama) and 84 percent white (64 percent for Obama).
In McConnell’s Senate, confirming Trump judges took precedence over everything else. The right-wing RedState.com wrote—approvingly, of course—of “the bloody-mindedness of Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley in ramming those nominees through the system.” Six months before the 2020 election, Grassley’s successor as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Lindsey Graham, urged federal judges in their sixties to retire so Republicans, rightly fearful of losing the Senate majority and the presidency, could fill the seats. McConnell, breaking yet another norm, had the Senate continue to confirm judges after Trump’s defeat, vowing he’d “leave no vacancy behind.” Since 1897, the Senate had confirmed just one judicial nomination of those pending after the presidents who made them lost election. It confirmed fourteen of Trump’s. Even as Republicans complained that Democrats would pack the courts once Biden took office to offset Trump’s judges, they actually were continuing to do so.

Jonathan Kobes.
Getty Images
More than any president before him, Trump picked young lawyers for the lifetime jobs. Many lacked the experience expected of federal judges. Democrat dikk Durbin of Illinois, who in 2021 became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told me that more than once he’d said to Trump officials at confirmation hearings, “So, let me get this straight: You couldn’t find one conservative Republican attorney in the state . . . who has had any courtroom experience or experience as a state judge?” More often than in past administrations, the American Bar Association rated some nominees “not qualified,” which didn’t deter Republicans from confirming them. However, forty-four-year-old Jonathan Kobes, an aide to Republican senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, needed Mike Pence to break a tie for his confirmation to the St. Louis–based Eighth Circuit in 2018. Kobes was the first federal judge in history confirmed by a vice president’s vote. Lawrence J. C. VanDyke, nearly forty-seven, was confirmed in late 2019 to the Ninth Circuit, although the ABA found him “not qualified” based on “strong evidence” from sixty lawyers and judges. Its harsh evaluation, which conservatives denounced, said those consulted about him called VanDyke “arrogant, lazy, an ideologue, and lacking in knowledge,” and said he “has an ‘entitlement’ temperament, does not have an open mind, and does not always have a commitment to being candid and truthful.”

Some nominees had troubling records regarding their attitudes toward racial minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate, took to the Wall Street Journal to object, “We should stop bringing candidates with questionable track records on race before the full Senate for a vote.” Scott was able to block several, given Republicans’ slim Senate margin.
All of Trump’s choices had one thing in common: serious conservative bona fides. As McConnell had half joked to the Federalist Society, ending the filibuster opened the door to “crazy right-wingers” who never would have been confirmed in the past. Three times Trump nominated forty-year-old Matthew Kacsmaryk, who’d opposed legal protections for LGBTQ people and said they had mental disorders, before Republicans finally approved him for a Texas trial court in 2019. Confirmed to another Texas court that year was Michael J. Truncale, sixty-one, who’d called Obama an “un-American imposter”; the only Republican to oppose him was Obama’s 2012 rival, Mitt Romney.

Neomi Rao at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in February 2019.
Zach Gibson
Another example: Neomi Rao, Trump’s forty-five-year-old czar against federal regulations, who replaced Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit Court that handles most challenges to such rules. Rao seemed a singularly odd choice, given the allegations Kavanaugh had faced during his confirmation: At Yale, she’d written that women who were sexually assaulted bore blame if they’d been drinking. Facing bipartisan opposition initially, she wrote to Judiciary Committee leaders, “If I were to address these issues now, I would have more empathy and perspective.” That assuaged Republican Joni Ernst of Iowa, an assault survivor who’d called Rao’s writings “abhorrent.” Separately, Rao privately reassured Republican Josh Hawley of Missouri, who’d worried that she was soft on abortion. Once on the D.C. court, Rao reliably took the administration’s side in cases important to Trump. She opposed Congress’s subpoenas of his financial records, for example, and upheld the Justice Department’s dismissal of the conviction of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn—a ruling that the full appeals court overturned decisively.

Perhaps the quintessential Republican judge of the Trump-McConnell era, however, was Justin Walker, a baby-faced political networker to rival Kavanaugh in his time. In less than a year between 2019 and 2020, Walker went from being a thirty-eight-year-old associate law professor in Louisville, Kentucky, to a federal district judge there and then a member of the powerful D.C. appeals court. The ABA had advised that Walker, with no trial experience, was unqualified to preside over a district court. That didn’t matter to Republican senators: he was a protégé of the majority leader. On March 13, 2020, McConnell and Kavanaugh flew to Louisville to participate in Walker’s formal investiture as a federal judge, an event that was remarkable for the openly political banter.
There, McConnell recalled that they’d met when Walker was eighteen; as a favor to Walker’s grandfather, the senator talked to the teenager for a school paper on the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” The party’s takeover of Congress that year was “the most exciting thing that had ever happened in my life,” the boy said, in McConnell’s recounting. “Clearly he had excellent political taste from quite a young age,” McConnell quipped. Walker interned in McConnell’s office, worked on Bush’s 2004 campaign, and clerked first at the D.C. court for Kavanaugh—who was only too happy to hire a protégé of the Senate Republican leader—and then for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on Kavanaugh’s recommendation. Kavanaugh, in his judicial robe, told the audience that he recalled just where Walker sat when Kavanaugh taught him at Harvard Law School.

In May 2020, Justin Walker swears in to testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on his nomination to be a United States Circuit Judge.
CAROLINE BREHMAN
Walker, also in a black robe, recognized each mentor. “It has been extremely important to me that Kentucky’s senior senator is Mitch McConnell,” he said, and then led the audience in applause. As for Kennedy, Walker told a weak joke that would become an issue in his next Senate confirmation hearing; in the telling, he said “the worst words” he’d ever heard was Kennedy’s disclosure that Chief Justice Roberts would uphold Obamacare. Of Kavanaugh, Walker joked, “What can I say that I haven’t already said”—he paused for effect—“on Fox News?” That nod to his ubiquitous support for Kavanaugh during the confirmation fight was a bit awkward. But what followed—an ideological call to arms—was simply inappropriate from a judge. Walker compared Kavanaugh to St. Paul: “Hard-pressed on every side but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed. Because in Brett Kavanaugh’s America, we will not surrender while you wage war on our work or our cause or our hope or our dream.” He stopped for applause, then closed by thanking Trump and “the Senate majority,” adding snarkily, “And to the Senate minority—no hard feelings.”
On the district court, Walker soon sparked a controversy that resonated beyond Louisville. With coronavirus infections peaking, the Democratic mayor had issued a directive against drive-in Easter services. Walker blocked it and lashed out: “On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter.” Twenty pages later he ended with musings on the meaning of Jesus’s resurrection to those eager to attend services: “The reason they will be there for each other and their Lord is the reason they believe He was and is there for us." Even a conservative analyst wrote that Walker’s rhetoric was “over the top,” and that he could have settled the matter with a fifteen-minute phone call among the parties. A liberal commentator, describing Walker’s order as more like “a screed against Democrats” on far-right Breitbart.com, said it exemplified what scornful judges called “auditioning” by Trump appointees—as in, primping for a higher court seat by showing off their conservatism. That’s what some associates had previously said of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh before their promotions. But Walker didn’t need to audition. Eight days earlier Trump had nominated him for the D.C. appeals court. Walker had followed the political path Kavanaugh helped pave for conservative judges years before. Already some on the right had tagged Walker as a future justice. That prospect would have to wait: In 2021, Democrats took over the White House and Senate.

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Initially, Democrats’ elation at Biden’s victory was offset by dismay at their apparent failure to capture a Senate majority. Few expected Democrats could win both runoff elections in Georgia, which would give them control of a 50–50 Senate with Kamala Harris’s tiebreaker vote. If McConnell remained in charge, they knew, many Biden judicial nominees would hit a wall. As courts scholar Russell Wheeler at the Brookings Institution had written, “We are reaching the point that confirmations stop unless the same party controls the White House and Senate.” Yet the Democratic candidates in Georgia—a Black man and a Jew—amazingly did win their elections January 5, 2021.
Given Democrats’ precarious margins in the Senate and House, most liberal activists dropped their unrealistic demand that Congress expand the Supreme Court so Biden could add progressive justices. Even so, after years of Republicans thwarting Obama’s nominees and then railroading Trump’s, Democrats were primed to act more aggressively than in the past to shape the judiciary. The pressure to do so was bottom-up, from the party’s base, donors, and progressive groups. In a break from past elections, more Democratic voters than Republicans had said that an important factor in their choice for president was concern about Supreme Court appointments. That reflected in part a backlash to the Kavanaugh and Barrett confirmations. Emboldened progressives forced eighty-seven-year-old Feinstein, disdained as too conciliatory toward Republicans, to relinquish her role as party leader on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Durbin became chairman once Democrats took the majority.

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Copying a page from Trump and the right, progressive groups were ready with lists of potential judges for Biden. One group was the American Constitution Society, the left’s weak imitation of the Federalist Society, now led by former senator Russ Feingold. Activists had canvassed lawyers, law professors, and local officials nationwide during the Trump years to vet prospects for judgeships should a Democrat become president. They emphasized diversity of race and gender, for a judiciary that “looks like America,” as Biden put it, but also professional and educational variety: fewer corporate lawyers and prosecutors, more public defenders, labor and legal-aid lawyers, and civil rights advocates. Fewer Ivy Leaguers, more state school alumni. As usual, Democrats didn’t focus on judicial philosophy and ideology like Republicans did, though certainly their criteria would yield generally progressive candidates. Activists also urged Senate Democrats to follow Republicans’ lead and end the blue slip tradition that gave opposition senators a veto over nominees from their states. Chris Kang, the former Obama adviser, said Senate Republicans mostly from southern states had blocked nearly twenty Obama nominees, all of them women or minorities, by withholding their blue slips.
No question, Democrats would be more partisan going forward. The question was whether they could beat Republicans at the game. Brian Fallon, the former Senate and Hillary Clinton adviser who was Kang’s cofounder of the liberal group Demand Justice, was skeptical even as he pressured Democratic leaders. “Mitch McConnell will obliterate norms without batting an eye,” he said. “Democrats constitutionally—no pun intended—don’t have that gene. They like the system to work. They like the government to function by norms.”
That certainly included Biden, long suspect on the left for his record as a moderate institutionalist on the Judiciary Committee, back to the Thomas hearings thirty years before. But the new president was receptive to the partisans’ push for a harder line, despite his promise to work with Republicans. He endorsed the call for diverse judicial candidates outside the corporate and prosecutorial mold. He promised a commission to examine potential changes to the judiciary, including term limits and additional judgeships. To expedite nominations, Biden agreed not to wait for ABA evaluations. “People are approaching this with a different sense of urgency,” said Paige Herwig, a White House counsel. “And they understand: They saw what the Trump administration did for four years.”

Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court
Biden didn’t inherit nearly as many vacancies as Trump had, though McConnell didn’t quite fulfill his vow to leave none behind. Circuit courts had five openings and federal trial courts more than sixty. When Garland finally won Senate confirmation—as Biden’s attorney general—his seat on the D.C. appeals court opened. Other vacancies loomed: Some judges had put off retirement rather than let Trump fill their seats, and about sixty were eligible by their age and years of service to take “senior status,” a limited role that allows presidents to name a full-time replacement. Those included more than a third of appellate judges.
Rebalancing the Supreme Court, however, was a lost cause. Breyer, eighty-two when Biden took office, was widely expected to retire before long, now that a Democrat would nominate a successor. Biden had promised to make history by naming the first Black woman to the high court. Ideologically, however, that would be an even swap, leaving the court’s balance unchanged. From the Supreme Court through lower courts, Republican appointees stood as potential roadblocks to the agenda of Biden and congressional Democrats—what liberal writer and lawyer Dahlia Lithwick called the “dead hand of the Trump administration that strikes down every single thing that Biden does in the coming years.”
That specter was evident in the new president’s first week: a Trump trial judge in Texas, in a case brought by the state’s Republican attorney general, blocked Biden’s one-hundred-day moratorium on deportations— his first step in reviewing Trump’s inhumane, xenophobic immigration policies. Days later, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court—all Trump appointees—gave a green light to a Trump directive to turn away children seeking asylum as health risks, a policy Biden opposed. The Biden administration would face a quandary in deciding whether to appeal such cases all the way to the Supreme Court. More than a year before the election, Wheeler, the judiciary expert, wrote of the potential that the conservative court would stymie laws and regulations from a Democratic president and Congress. That, he wrote, in turn could trigger progressives’ attacks on the court’s legitimacy, much like in the New Deal era, reviving and intensifying the pressure for court-packing.
It had been judicial appointments more than anything, even more than cutting taxes and regulations, that kept the Republican establishment in thrall to Trump. That was the Faustian bargain party leaders made for five years with the self-dealing charlatan who provoked an existential crisis for their party, and for democracy. Chief among them: McConnell, the man who denied Garland his rightful seat on the high court for Trump to fill with Gorsuch, rammed Kavanaugh through and then engineered Barrett's confirmation just days before elections that would end Trump's presidency and ultimately Senate Republicans' majority.
Reelected in 2020 to a seventh six-year term, at seventy-eight, McConnell will be around for his party’s next chapter. Republicans could well retake control of the Senate and House in 2022, given the close margins and the midterm jinx for the president’s party. Whether he's leader of a minority or majority, McConnell will do what he can to obstruct Biden’s agenda and especially his judicial nominees. But however the elections for Congress and the White House play out, McConnell can be satisfied that he, more than any single person, ensured that the Supreme Court will almost certainly remain in the conservatives’ corner well beyond his lifetime.
Adapted from Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court ©2021 Jackie Calmes and reprinted by permission from Twelve Books / Hachette Book Group.
Jackie Calmes Jackie Calmes has been a journalist in Washington for nearly four decades, most recently as the White House editor in the Los Angeles Times bureau; she is also the author of Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court.
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