[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 84 (Thursday, May 18, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1729-S1730]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Nomination of Nancy G. Abudu
Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, today I rise to oppose the nomination
of Nancy Abudu as President Biden's nominee for appointment as a U.S.
circuit judge for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Now, in a government as divided as ours is at this time, we expect to
have some controversial nominees that come before us at the Judiciary
Committee. We expect debate; we do expect disagreement; but what we
should never expect or tolerate is a nominee who has proven herself
completely unfit for the role she is asking.
Ms. Abudu has shown us that there is no such thing as a good-faith
debate. She views disagreements over policy as evidence of bigotry. She
describes herself as a radical legal activist and has compared her
fellow Americans to Jim Crow-era racists and endorsed political
violence against conservatives.
She has stated that policing is--and I am going to quote her here--
the true threat to our collective safety. Hear me out on this. She has
said that policing is--and I quote her--the true threat to our
collective safety. She has embraced lawless sanctuary city policies and
compared our criminal justice system to the horrors of slavery. These
are her statements and her positions.
I would be doing a disservice to our Federal, State, and local law
enforcement officers if I didn't point out the rank hypocrisy of my
Democratic colleagues' attempt to force this nominee through during
National Police Week.
Now, as I said, she feels like policing is a threat to our collective
safety, but my Democratic colleagues, during this National Police Week,
are choosing to push her forward.
She used the significant power of her position within the Southern
Poverty Law Center to weaponize charges of hate against her political
opponents, all the while covering up blatant discrimination within her
organization.
Indeed, the Southern Poverty Law Center, every year, issues their
``hate'' list. This should give everyone pause, but perhaps the most
egregious example of Ms. Abudu's hostility toward the rule of law
involves this very Chamber, those of us of each party who sit in this
Chamber.
In 2021, she engaged in a vicious mudslinging campaign in an attempt
to manipulate the U.S. Senate into abandoning the filibuster and
endorsing a radical overhaul of our Federal elections. Her campaign was
so full of misrepresentations--and we will just call them falsehoods--
that even some of the most progressive Members of her party balked at
what she was doing. This is the conduct that the Biden administration
is seeking to reward.
Justice is to be evenhanded; equal justice for all; one system of
justice, not two tiers of justice. We must not tolerate what is
happening here, and we must not approve this nominee.
We had a great discussion in the Judiciary Committee about people who
are unfit for the bench, unfit for public service, and the need to make
certain that people are fit for this service. Ms. Abudu, by her
actions, has proven herself to be unethical, unscrupulous, and
completely untethered from any acceptable philosophy of law.
To approve this nominee would be to rubberstamp a nominee who terms
herself a ``radical leftist activist.'' It would rubberstamp a radical
agenda. It would rubberstamp an activist judge. We don't want that on
our courts, and this is something the American people have rejected
repeatedly.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following articles be
printed in the Record following the conclusion of my remarks.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Nancy Abudu, Another Concession to the Far Left and to One of Its Most
Disreputable Organizations
(By Carrie Campbell Severino)
President Biden's judicial gifts to dark-money groups do
not end with Ketanji Brown Jackson or other far-left nominees
he picked for lower courts. Eleventh Circuit nominee Nancy
Abudu made her career in the dark-money realm since 2005,
when she joined the American Civil Liberties Union. She
worked for several years for the group's Voting Rights
Project, leaving just as another future Biden nominee--Dale
Ho--became its director. From there, Abudu assumed the post
of legal director of the ACLU of Florida.
In 2019, after over a decade with the ACLU, Abudu joined
the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a once admirable
group that in recent years has been mired in scandal and
recognized as a racket that betrays its stated principles--
not least by vilifying those it disagrees with as ``hate
groups.'' A number of liberals have acknowledged this, with
Nathan J. Robinson, founder of the left-wing Current Affairs,
calling the group's signature ``Hate Map'' an ``outright
fraud.''
Abudu is the group's director for strategic litigation. A
wide-ranging coalition of over 50 organizations and
individuals protested her nomination in a letter to Senate
Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Durbin and Ranking
Member Chuck Grassley. They stated bluntly: ``Ms. Abudu works
for a disreputable organization that has no business being a
feeder for positions to any judicial office--not even of a
traffic court--let alone the second highest court system in
the United States. She is a political activist not a jurist
and is unfit to serve at the federal appellate level.''
The Family Research Council (FRC) circulated the letter.
They have good reason to have sounded the alarm. They know
the real danger of being labeled a ``hate group'' by the
SPLC. As their letter to Durbin and Grassley explains:
These destructive accusations have done real harm to many
people. In the first conviction under the post-9/11 District
of Columbia terrorism statute, the convicted terrorist was
shown to have been motivated by the SPLC's ``hate group''
designation and related identifying information.
In that case, SPLC materials facilitated a troubled young
man's delusional, and thankfully unsuccessful, plan to commit
mass murder. Using the SPLC ``hate map,'' this native of
northern Virginia targeted the Family Research Council (FRC)
and two other nearby groups in August 2012 for having beliefs
supporting traditional marriage. Fortunately, no one was
killed, although he did shoot and critically wound FRC's
unarmed building manager who subdued him while wounded.
[[Page S1730]]
To make matters worse, the SPLC's leadership--Abudu
included--apparently haven't learned their lesson. ``[O]ver
the past decade the SPLC has targeted an increasing number of
policy groups with whom it has policy disagreements. Any
group that disagrees with the SPLC about positions it
advocates is deemed to be evil and worthy of destruction,''
laments the coalition letter.
In addition to its inflammatory designations, the SPLC has
amassed a war chest to fund its left-wing activism totaling
$570 million as of October 2020. Its holdings are, to put it
mildly, highly unusual for an American non-profit company.
Among investments listed in its 2020 financial statements are
$162 million in non-U.S. equity funds, $23 million in
``arbitrage funds,'' $89 million in private equity funds, and
$7 million in long-short funds. The coalition letter
observed, ``The SPLC looks more like a hedge fund than a
public interest legal and political activist group.''
Amy Sterling Casil, the CEO of the consulting firm Pacific
Human Capital, remarked regarding its transfer of millions of
dollars to foreign bank accounts that ``I've never known a
US-based nonprofit dealing in human rights or social services
to have any foreign bank accounts.'' She added, ``I know of
no legitimate reason for any US-based nonprofit to put money
in overseas, unregulated bank accounts'' and called the
SPLC's practice ``unethical.'' The watchdog group
CharityWatch gave the SPLC a grade of ``F.''
In addition to Abudu's shady professional associations, she
consistently has taken far-left positions in litigation.
Perhaps the most prominent were cases Abudu argued while at
the ACLU's Voting Rights Center, for example, making
unsuccessful challenges to felon voting provisions in
Mississippi, Arizona, and Tennessee. As legal director of the
ACLU of Florida, Abudu unsuccessfully challenged the state's
requirement that a felon's voting rights could be restored
only after all fines, fees, and restitution imposed as part
of the felon's sentence had been paid. The Eleventh Circuit,
sitting en banc, found no evidence to support Abudu's claim
of intentional racial discrimination. Undeterred, Abudu
joined several other groups to submit Florida's law to the
United Nations Committee on Human Rights for review of human
rights violations.
Since joining the SPLC, Abudu has maintained her ties with
the ACLU of Florida and continued her losing track record in
court with an unsuccessful Eighth Amendment claim against
Florida's Department of Corrections for not fully
accommodating a transgender inmate's ``social-transitioning''
requests.
The Biden administration and congressional Democrats
continue to make scurrilous allegations of suppression of
voting rights in Republican-led states, cherry-picking them
over Democrat-led states with more stringent election rules
and brazenly trying to weaponize the courts to do their
partisan bidding. And Biden's Department of Justice has
specifically targeted Georgia, where Abudu would sit if
confirmed, alleging the state's recent election law violated
the Voting Rights Act and engaged in racial discrimination.
If you believe a Judge Abudu would fairly evaluate Georgia's
voting integrity laws according to the rule of law rather
than her own agenda, I have a bridge to sell you.
____
[From AMAC, Feb. 15, 2023]
Biden's Radical Judges
(By Robert B. Charles)
Watch the flank! Sometimes an assault on vital interests
and values does not come head-on, but from an angle, on the
flank. We just saw the Chinese slip a balloon across the
continent, figurative knife between the ribs. Domestically,
the judiciary is a flank--but it matters. Biden and Democrat
Senate are loading the federal judiciary with leftists, and
it matters.
In the first year of his White House, Biden got the largest
number of Article III federal judges confirmed of any
president since Ronald Reagan. The difference is that many of
Biden's nominees aspire to concentration of federal power.
Broadly speaking, they tend to tip against traditional
understandings and caselaw tied to unfettered speech, free
exercise of religion, gun ownership, traditional
understandings of family, parental prerogatives, due process,
equal protection, and the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments.
His recent nominees are often openly pro-abortion, no
apologies for opposing Dobbs, happy to be activists--as they
think that is what courts are for, correcting errors of the
Founders, Congress, strict constructionists, textualists, and
those who dare to think words have meaning.
While Trump got 234 federal judges appointed, that was
playing catchup after Obama's 329 judicial confirmations.
Now, continuing the leftist attack on our judiciary, Biden
has pressed increasingly radical judges--and one radical
justice--to the federal bench.
When a Supreme Court nominee considers is controversial to
publicly define a women, simply declines to do so, something
is wildly wrong with the process. Imagine Justices Sandra Day
O'Connor (appointed by Reagan) or Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(appointed by Clinton) not knowing what a women is.
Indeed, I think one can say--for very different reasons,
but with a basic understanding of and respect for biology--
O'Connor, Ginsburg, Reagan and Clinton ALL knew the
difference between men and women.
Now comes the latest rash of leftist nominees. After Biden
nominated 98 Article III judges in his first two years, 51
still awaiting confirmation, his left-lurching party now
controls the Senate, which is in charge of judicial
confirmations.
Beyond this, we face 10 vacancies on federal circuit
courts--a bench that manages all federal appeals short of the
Supreme Court, plus 75 US district court vacancies. An added
27 federal judicial vacancies will arise before end of
Biden's term (four appeals, 23 district).
The part that causes a shiver is not these numbers, but the
under- and un-qualified nature of those being nominated to
important judgeships. As one observer noted, this seems to be
Biden's means for ``paying back the left-wing dark money
groups who spent over a billion dollars to help elect him.''
He will get the Democrat-controlled Senate to sweep a raft of
leftists onto the courts.
Can he really do that? Yes and no. On the one hand, another
collection of unabashed leftists is about to be swept into
available openings, likely soon confirmed by the Democrat
Senate, most with a rich history of working with and for
leftist causes.
These include nominees proud to have worked on left-leaning
cases that pushed pro-abortion, antigun, anti-free speech,
and anti-conservative causes and cases. They include those
who championed radical positions advanced by Planned
Parenthood, gun control groups, and those working to punish
free speech and worship.
Last week two dozen nominees got through the Senate
Judiciary Committee, headed for floor votes. Among those to
watch are judges like Julie Rikelman, who was the
``litigation director'' for the ``Center for Reproductive
Rights,'' headed for the First Circuit Court of Appeals. She
literally litigated against Dobbs, and lost.
Another to watch is Nancy Abudu, who was a litigation
director for the Southern Poverty Law Center--after time with
the ACLU. She is destined for the 11th Cir. Court of Appeals.
Even the typically quieter Republican National Lawyers
Association spoke against her which wrote that, ``Her views
goes beyond ... even progressive activists, and we see no
reason to believe that she will be an impartial judge on the
hot button' issue of election law.''
A reality check will lower the blood pressure a bit, as
these judges will not--in one fell swoop--tip the balance of
these circuits, but the idea that judges who are unable to be
impartial on such a basic issue as ``election law'' are being
nominated--and confirmed--is worrisome.
In the end, the core question is--what can be done, in an
age of polarized, often strangely off-the-mark thinking--to
protect the federal bench from becoming, over time,
radicalized?
The answer is a few important things. First, level-headed
Senators can put holds on some of these nominees, tabling
them for a time, if not indefinitely. This will also send a
signal. For votes needed to tip the Senate balance, possibly
on fossil fuels, law enforcement, support for Ukraine, and
illegal immigration limitation--the point can be made to
centrists like Joe Manchin: Radicals must be kept off the
federal bench.
In the event that radical appointees violate ethical norms
on the bench, impeachments can be initiated, driving home the
point that political activism is disallowed for federal
judges.
Additionally, hard-hitting hearings of nominees should be
the norm, with radical, non-judicial behaviors, statements,
and past actions forcing Senate Democrats to tough decisions.
While accountability is hard, the effort is worthy--and even
some Democrats may balk.
Last, all Americans need to think harder about the flanks.
As the Communist Chinese continue testing our national
security, the radical left tests our commitment to individual
liberty. Good judges are ``judicial'' in temperament, not
activist, not partisan, not political. Watch the flank!
Mrs. BLACKBURN. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Peters). The Senator from California.