Democratic senators also should oppose radical judicial nominee Nancy Abudu

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri raked a judicial nominee over the coals on April 27, for good reason. Nancy Abudu, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, shouldn’t be a federal judge.

Hawley’s harshest questioning concerned the organization for which Abudu has worked since 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is a disgraceful organization, and he wondered why she would choose to be affiliated with it. He cited not just conservatives but very liberal activists and journalists repeatedly referring to the SPLC as a “fraud,” with one describing it “collectively” as “one of the greatest frauds in American life.”

Hawley said that the year Abudu joined SPLC, 2019, “was the year the SPLC paid $3.4 million in response to defamation lawsuits. 2019 was the year Charity Watch gave your organization an ‘F’ rating. The SPLC has been labeled by the left-wing policy journal Current Affairs as an outright fraud that uses willful deception designed to scare liberals into writing checks.”

In addition to a host of well-publicized internal scandals, the SPLC has labeled as “hate groups” a number of organizations and legal-aid organizations that are mainstream enough to have repeatedly won cases before the Supreme Court. Yet when Hawley asked her if she would condone, or alternatively denounce, the SPLC activities and positions that earned it such universal opprobrium, she repeatedly dodged his questions.

Moreover, Abudu’s repeated oral testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she is not involved in the SPLC’s work trying to delegitimize other groups as “hate groups” contradicts her own written testimony, which she handed in just a few months ago. In writing, she said that she oversees a broad swath of the SPLC’s work, including, again, in her own words, “litigation related to hate groups.” Those contradictory aspects of her testimony can’t both be right, which certainly indicates that one of them is untrue.

The only thing of substance she did offer to Hawley was that she is proud of her work for the SPLC in working for “voting rights.” As I noted in a January column, her work there, not just the organization’s but her personal record on that front there and earlier at the American Civil Liberties Union, should be a cause not of pride but of shame. She has argued that requirement for voter identification and even for voters to be U.S. citizens, not citizens of, say, communist China or Venezuela, are both examples of “voter suppression” and that laws keeping felons from voting are “practically the same system as during slavery.” She wasn’t just talking about ex-convicts, either — in 2020, she bragged of her work for the SPLC in a “a vote-from-jail project.”

“I can’t believe you’ve been nominated for this position,” Hawley said. “I can’t believe that the president of the United States would nominate someone from this organization with this record, and I can’t believe that you would sit here today and refuse to condemn this hateful, frankly, violent rhetoric.”

Hawley said it well. No senator of reason or of good will should vote to confirm Nancy Abudu.

Related Content