Most of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees are distasteful to conservatives, but only a few are objectively so extreme as to be unfit for the bench. Nancy Gbana Abudu, though, is one such extremist.
It was somewhat lost in the Christmas shuffle that Biden on Dec. 23 nominated Abudu for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Abudu is the deputy legal director and director for strategic litigation at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing group that once merited at least some respect for its work against white supremacy but which years ago forfeited legitimacy.
Abudu’s nomination merits rejection both because of her high-ranking affiliation with the SPLC and because of her own record of outlandishness.
Let’s start with the SPLC. It might be one thing to have an arm’s length affiliation with the group, but quite another to hold a position of high authority with an outfit so radical and dishonest. Decades ago, the SPLC did decent work while developing a database of U.S. “hate groups,” mostly right-wing but some more aligned with the Left as well. But after making itself a recognized arbiter of “hate,” the SPLC began labeling mainstream conservative organizations, even ones with distinguished records before the Supreme Court, as hate groups — sometimes with literally violent results.
By equating groups with honest and respectful differences of opinion with groups that preach racial supremacy and virulent antisemitism, the SPLC has gone from being an arbiter of hate to a purveyor of its own brand of hatred.
For two years, Abudu has led litigation efforts for this awful outfit.
Then again, she and the SPLC are a good fit.
For example, Abudu has not been content merely to disagree with widespread voter integrity measures, but insists they are active efforts at “voter suppression.” Requiring an ID to vote? Suppression. Disallowing student IDs for voting (because, of course, college students usually remain legal residents in their hometowns, not at the college town)? Suppression. And, get this, asking that someone not vote unless he is a U.S. citizen (rather than, say, a citizen of Red China)? That, too, is “suppression.”
Thus does Abudu portray all good-faith efforts to maintain voter integrity, even ones endorsed by former President Jimmy Carter and by liberal Supreme Court justices, as if they are the malevolent equivalents to Jim Crow-era voting restrictions.
Yet that’s not the worst of it. Less than two years ago, Abudu wrote that laws keeping felons from voting are “practically the same system as during slavery.”
Yes, you read that correctly: Abudu argues that the duly considered laws, enacted through legitimate representative government, deciding when and how people who have committed crimes can recover their voting privileges, are the equivalent of slavery. And this was not an offhand, ill-considered remark. And it wasn’t done years ago in some college setting when the exuberance of youth sometimes leads to spewing nonsense. This was in 2020, in a published article while wielding a position of professional authority.
There is nothing wrong with judicial nominees having expressed strong political opinions. There is everything wrong with evincing such a disrespect for established norms and alternative opinions that one spreads calumny upon perceived adversaries. One of the primary, long-standing determinants of fitness for a judgeship is the possession of a sensibility known as “judicial temperament.” Abudu gives every evidence of just the opposite: injudicious extremism.
Even somewhat-centrist Democrats should join every Republican in the Senate in rejecting Abudu’s nomination to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
