No good reason exists for any senator, much less a Republican one, to oppose the supposedly “controversial” Thomas Farr for a federal district judgeship in North Carolina.
Liberal critics accuse Farr of hostility to voting rights for blacks because of Farr’s legal work involving issues in his state, such as voter ID requirements and redistricting. Farr survived a procedural Senate floor ballot Wednesday only with the help of a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence, and his final confirmation vote was delayed until next week because Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., is absent due to a death in his family.
Republicans, with a 51-49 majority in the Senate, can lose only one of their members and still prevail (with Pence’s aid) if Democrats unify in opposition. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., already is voting no, for reasons having nothing to do with Farr.
The other wild card reportedly is Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. His support for Farr in the procedural vote was in doubt until the last moment.
As a great admirer of Scott’s and one of the first two columnists to give him national attention, I trust his principles and his judgment. But if he has any remaining concerns about Farr, they can easily be dispelled by attention to real facts rather than the liberal caricature thereof.
The most volatile charge against Farr is that he supposedly advised then-Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., a hardline conservative, on a postcard mailer, largely to black voters, that critics labeled as “voter suppression.”
What they gloss over is that at the very beginning of the effort, Farr advised not for it, but against it. I have in my possession the 1991 memo written by Justice Department lawyers urging that a voting-rights complaint against Helms’ team be pursued. On pages 13-14, it clearly says that Farr told the others in the meeting that “a postcard mailing like the mailing conducted in 1984 would not be particularly useful.” Nowhere else in the 54-page memo is there any other indication of Farr’s involvement.
The two other criticisms of Farr are equally meritless. The first involves Farr’s work as a lawyer on voter-identification requirements in North Carolina. The U.S. Supreme Court has found that voter-ID laws can be perfectly constitutional, with liberal Justice John Paul Stevens writing the lead opinion that the “inconvenience” of securing the right ID card (in the case at hand) “does not qualify as a substantial burden on most voters’ right to vote.” (Scott’s own South Carolina has a voter-ID law which seems to work just fine.) The precise details of implementing ID laws may change from state to state, which is how some liberal judges have ruled that technicalities made some of them (such as ones challenged in North Carolina) unconstitutional. But to ascribe some sort of racial animus to the push for simple voter ID is absurd.
That absurdity is even more pronounced in the leftist effort to smear Farr for his legal work on redistricting. With regard to racial issues, redistricting law is almost mind-bogglingly complex. On the one hand, federal courts have insisted not just that “majority-minority” (in practice, usually black majority) districts should be created where possible, but that the margin of the black majority should be sizable enough to guarantee that black voters can elect their “candidate of choice.” In the 1990s, black Democratic organizations and the Bill Clinton administration both vociferously supported decisions insisting that a sizable black majority must not be “diluted” into one with too narrow a margin. (The legal term of art for avoiding dilution is “non-retrogression.”)
That, in effect, is the same position represented at times by Farr. But since the 1990s, Democrats realized their own position led to too many black voters (who tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats) being “packed” into some districts, leaving too few black voters in adjoining districts for Democrats to be competitive. As Democrats’ political calculations changed, so did their legal position. Their new political calculations led them to denounce as “racist” the very practices they once had so strongly favored.
As SCOTUSblog accurately explained it:
A lawyer cannot fairly be accused of racial animus when merely trying to navigate between what virtually every high court justice acknowledges is a rock and a hard place.
The American Bar Association’s review committee twice unanimously has found Thomas Farr to be “well qualified” for this federal judgeship. It’s long past time to confirm him.
Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner, and is the author of “The Accidental Prophet” trilogy of recently published satirical, literary novels.
