This week, the Senate confirmed Allison Jones Rushing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, a position with a lifetime appointment. Rushing is only 37 and the country’s youngest federal judge.
While I’d love to be excited over such an incredible accomplishment for such a young woman, (my) feminism means celebrating progress for women. It does not mean celebrating each individual woman, even when she’s terrible, which Rushing absolutely is.
It’s not that she’s conservative, having clerked for Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. She’s well beyond regular standards of conservativism. She’s worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy and training organization that the SPLC has labeled an official hate group over its efforts to criminalize homosexuality here and abroad, its support of state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad, and more.
She’s also denounced the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage equality in United States vs Windsor and expressed indignation that the SCOTUS majority on that case saw the attempt to ban same-sex marriage on the basis of religion as bigotry.
In a statement, Sharon McGowan, Legal Director and Chief Strategy Officer of Lambda Legal, said of Rushing, “Throughout her brief legal career, Allison Rushing has supported and closely associated herself with one of the most extreme anti-LGBT organizations operating in this country today, the Alliance Defending Freedom. Rather than disqualifying her from consideration, this aspect of her record seems to have made up for all of the other deficiencies in her record, including her inexperience and lack of any meaningful professional connection to the state in which she will sit.”
And indeed, those deficiencies in experience are glaring. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin said from the Senate floor, “She has practiced law for nine years. How many cases has she tried to verdict or judgment? Four. Has she been the lead attorney on any of those cases? No.”
“That is the most scant, weakest legal resume imaginable for someone who’s seeking a lifetime appointment to the second-highest court of the land,” he said.
Every Republican senator voted for Rushing. Every Democrat voted against her.
Trump has had more federal judges confirmed than any other president by this point in their first term, and like Rushing, they tend to be, as the Alliance for Justice puts it, “young, minimally qualified and highly ideological.” Trump has two more circuit court nominees facing Senate confirmation hearings this week and they both definitely fit that description.
46-year-old Chad Readler has fought to restrict women’s reproductive rights and filed a brief against the Affordable Care Act, including its protections of those with preexisting conditions. He’s also defended some terrible things like separating migrant children from their parents at the border, discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, Trump’s transgender military ban, his Muslim ban, and Betsy DeVos’ work to undermine the American education system. He’s fought to restrict women’s reproductive rights
40-year-old Eric Murphy has argued against marriage equality and for voter disenfranchisement. He’s tried to limit women’s reproductive rights. The AFJ says “Murphy’s record demonstrates a narrow-minded elitism that raises serious concerns that he will undermine critical rights and legal protections.”
Trump is changing the landscape of our entire judicial system for generations to come and these Republican senators are happy to let him.
(via HuffPost, image: MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images)
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