As a circuit court judge, Judge Neomi Rao has delivered multiple wins to President Trump, including a crucial decision to dismiss charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn and the dissent to a district court ruling that backed a subpoena of Trump’s financial records. On Wednesday, Trump repaid Rao by blatantly snubbing her and leaving her off his additional list of potential Supreme Court nominees and instead adding none other than Republican Sen. Josh Hawley to the horse race.
The greatest threat to Trump’s appointment of Rao to replace Brett Kavanaugh’s old seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals’s D.C. Circuit was not a Democratic faction hell-bent on smearing her as some sort of rape apologist based on college-era provocation — it was Hawley.
Hawley nearly derailed Rao’s confirmation using the same sort of baseless gossip about her personal opinion on abortion that the Left used to slander Kavanaugh as a sexual predator. Although Rao, a former Supreme Court clerk and White House counsel, had the emphatic backing of Don McGahn and the Federalist Society, Hawley decided that he knew better than the backbone of the single most successful unofficial apparatus of the contemporary Republican Party. Hawley threatened to use his plum post on the Judiciary Committee to stonewall the career of a star GOP judicial nominee — and a woman of color at that.
Thankfully, Rao and the brighter bulbs of the Republican Party overcame Hawley’s posturing.
There are many, many reasons to vote against Joe Biden. Because of foreign policy achievements (as seen in Israel) and Mitch McConnell’s success in pushing judicial nominees, there are a number of reasons to vote for Trump. Any sense of personal loyalty or principled jurisprudence is not one of them.
Consider, Rao took up the most controversial job post after Kavanaugh’s, knowing full well that she’d be raked over the coals because of her heterodoxy as a Jewish Indian-American woman who subscribes to ardent judicial originalism. Not only did she survive the smear campaign of the Left, but also of Hawley, a freshman senator with the audacity to derail one of the most high-profile and high-stakes appointments of Trump’s term. Instead of thanking Rao with even a ceremonial tossing of her name into the ring, he bends over backward to back Hawley, the sniveling theocrat more concerned with the length of your Facebook feed than our nearly $27 trillion national debt and the theft from our grandchildren necessitated by the moral crime of Social Security.
Great job all around. If Trump loses, he and Hawley will deserve it.
