Audrey Perry Martin: Biden Nominees Undermining Confidence in the Courts

The American legal system depends on the belief that justice is blind and judges are impartial for confidence to be maintained. Unfortunately, this trust has suffered a significant blow in recent years. Americans have witnessed a two-tiered justice system emerge, where violent activists are given a free pass to destroy whole neighborhoods in the name of social justice, while peaceful pro-life protesters are arrested on flimsy pretexts, simply because they oppose the policies of the Biden Administration.

The Supreme Court’s draft decision in the Dobbs case leaked to the press, with no one held accountable for it, also damaged the legal system’s reputation. Even after hostile mobs converged on the justices’ homes and performed screaming protests, no one was held responsible.

It is concerning when judges can’t be expected to adhere to the law’s principles and show professional competence without being affected by external influences such as interests, publicism, or criticisms. The nomination of staunch ideologues, as indicated by their record, goes against public trust and is the opposite of what’s expected from an impartial judiciary system.

This is why the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) opposes the appointment of Nancy Abudu to the Eleventh Circuit formally. The step has only been taken once before to oppose one other nomination by President Joe Biden. Abudu is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Strategic Litigation Director, a notorious organization that labels institutions like the Family Research Council as hate groups. Recently, one of their attorneys was arrested for domestic terrorism in an attack on the future site of an Atlanta, Georgia police training facility.

Further, Abudu has been responsible for making extreme statements outside the mainstream, like her comparison of felons’ loss of voting rights to slavery and equating commonsense election reforms to voter suppression.

Abudu represents the far-left’s push to put radical judicial nominees in power to reshape the American judicial system. Despite more than a year of waiting, Senate Democrats and the Biden Administration will not give up on her nomination. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only troubling nomination; others like Nusrat Jahan Choudhury, Julie Rikelman, and Natasha Merle are also controversial nominees with concerning history or a profound lack of basic knowledge of the law.

President Biden has repeatedly nominated unqualified individuals into positions of power. If the Senate is serious about maintaining trust in the judiciary’s impartiality, they should vote “no” on the appointments of Nancy Abudu and other candidates whose personal ideology affects their ability to interpret and apply the law.