Since Donald Trump became president, Democrats have been engaged in an astonishing display of judicial obstruction. “Senate Democrats have indiscriminately forced the Senate to take 47 cloture votes on judicial and executive nominations since Trump took office,” notes Carrie Severino in National Review. “For an idea of how unprecedented this is, consider that there were a total of only six such votes at this point in the previous four presidential administrations combined.” This is so pointlessly egregious, significant numbers of Democrats have gone on to actually vote for nominees whose confirmations the party was holding up.
That’s bad enough, but making matters worse is that the American Bar Association, as per usual, is acting as a wing of the Democratic party and launching gratuitous personal attacks on GOP judicial nominees. The latest saga involves Leonard Steven Grasz, who was Nebraska’s chief deputy attorney general for 11 years and is now nominated for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
For decades, the ABA had a semi-official role issuing ratings for federal judicial nominees. The ABA’s partisanship became too much to ignore, and the second Bush administration openly rejected the notion the ABA had an advisory capacity. Nonetheless, the ABA continues to rate nominees and recently declared Grasz “not qualified” for the federal bench, provoking a flurry of unfairly damning headlines.
According to the ABA, Grasz is guilty of “bias and lack of open-mindedness,” a judgment it reached by con-ducting anonymous interviews. It also challenged Grasz on such out-of-bounds topics as why he sends his kids to Lutheran schools. But the real issue appears to be that Grasz is pro-life. The ABA has distorted something he wrote in order to conclude that he will ignore judicial precedents he doesn’t like regarding abortion. The ABA fails to mention that in the article it claims is troubling, he states, “Lower federal courts are obliged to follow clear legal precedent regardless of whether it may seem unwise or even morally repugnant to do so.”
Grasz does, however, argue that lower courts shouldn’t extend Supreme Court rulings on abortion beyond what rights are plainly established. The truth is that it’s the ABA, not Grasz, that supports judicial activism.
