If President Joe Biden really is a “centrist,” why does he keep nominating radical lawyers for judgeships? If Biden says he does not want to “defund the police,” why does he keep embracing prominent defunders?
Biden made a vice president of Kamala Harris, who repeatedly advocated a redirection of funding away from police departments and applauded when mayors did so. His nomination of Adeel Mangi to the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals is rightfully languishing due to Mangi’s affiliation with a group that promotes anti-semites. And now Biden is pushing an anti-police activist for a federal district judgeship in Washington, D.C., a city already plagued by a major crime wave.
This nominee is Amir Ali, the president and executive director of the MacArthur Justice Center. MacArthur is a far-Left group that says the nation’s whole justice system is rotten with “systemic racism,” calls for defunding police, opposes hiring more agents to help the overwhelmed border patrol forces, and argued that infamously radical Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot somehow was not left-wing enough on bail-bond policies. In the wake of counterfeiter George Floyd’s 2020 death by police in Minnesota, a MacArthur spokesman advocated “making police departments obsolete.”
Even as rampant crime racked my native city of New Orleans, MacArthur was lobbying for “sharp reductions in law enforcement.” The police budget was indeed cut, and the Crescent City soon became the “murder capital of the United States.”
While MacArthur does some good work litigating cases where police or courts clearly have mistreated suspects or “imprisoned people” (MacArthur’s super-sensitive term for “convicts”), its radical tinges (as described above) and reflexively anti-police attitudes should be a warning sign, especially for the bench of the nation’s only federal city, one now wracked by violence.
Ali himself has built his whole career so far on crusadingly litigating in favor of what he himself calls “economic and racial justice issues, and to elevating the voices of marginalized communities.” Well, that’s all fine, but does a crusader from the far reaches of one side belong in a role as judge, which is meant for a neutral arbiter?
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There are plenty of ways to promote a better justice system without taking radical positions that demonize police, as the MacArthur Center has done. Conservatives led by my late friend Kevin Kane worked closely together with liberals, for example, in Louisiana — one of MacArthur’s home bases — to pass sentencing reform. In Alabama, I served on a special commission, with members ranging from the liberal ACLU and prisoners’ advocates to conservative state legislators and victims’ rights advocates, to revise laws governing how and when some felons can regain voting privileges. Across all those ideological lines, the commission’s recommendations were unanimous, and they were applauded by the “progressive” Equal Justice Initiative.
The work of Ali and of his MacArthur Center stands in contrast to that cooperative spirit. In our political and judicial system there is definitely a place for strenuous advocacy, even for those with rather radical approaches. This does not mean, however, that the advocate, at just age 39 and without much seasoning in more impartial settings, is ready to take the judicial bench.
