Senate Judiciary Committee to consider anti-civil rights judicial nominees next week
It’s the first nominations hearing of the year. Democrats need to show up.
The Senate Judiciary Committee today made public its plan to hold a nominations hearing next Wednesday, February 4, at 10:15 a.m. The hearing will likely include the four judicial nominees Trump announced on January 6: Anna St. John for the Eastern District of Louisiana, John Thomas Shepherd for the Western District of Arkansas, Andrew Davis for the Western District of Texas, and Chris Wolfe for the Western District of Texas.
Democrats on the committee must show up and ask them questions, live and on camera, and then submit written questions for the record — especially because these nominations continue Trump’s disturbing trend of naming lifetime judicial nominees who have a demonstrated hostility to civil and human rights.
Take Anna St. John — currently the president and general counsel of the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute. When Trump announced her nomination on Truth Social, he said that she “has a strong record of tirelessly fighting to protect Free Speech, champion Religious Liberty, and keep men out of women’s sports.”
Trump’s inclusion of her anti-trans record in his short social media message underscores the importance, for him and this administration, of appointing judges who they believe will undermine civil rights — and LGBTQ+ rights in particular — from the bench.
Ethan Rice, senior attorney with the Fair Courts Project at Lambda Legal, told me earlier this month that “President Trump has nominated to the federal judiciary attorneys he’s explicitly praised for their anti-transgender work” and that “Anna St. John, nominated to the District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, has written numerous briefs arguing against the rights of transgender people.”
This record is further explored in a new fact sheet released by Alliance for Justice. As they write:
St. John authored and co-authored numerous amicus briefs undermining LGBTQ+ rights. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, St. John supported allowing businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals under the guise of religious freedom. In Green v. Miss USA, St. John called for banning transgender women from the Miss USA pageant as it “would infringe upon the pageant’s rights” (emphasis added). Using dehumanizing language, St. John has also supported banning transgender women and girls from teams that are consistent with their gender identity. She misgendered them in her briefs.
Such actions send a clear message: that businesses should be able to freely discriminate against LGBTQ+ people, and that such discrimination must be allowed to continue. Such blatant biases should be disqualifying for a lifetime seat on the federal judiciary
In a letter sent to committee leadership today, more than 20 organizations expressed their opposition to St. John’s confirmation because she has “spent her legal career silencing women, attacking LGBTQ+ rights, and cutting off corporate accountability for everyday people.” The organizations argue that she “consistently sides with large corporations over consumers, workers, and ordinary people” and that, despite claiming to be a consumer advocate, she “actually spent years defending big corporations when they hurt people.”
The groups also highlight her anti-DEI record, saying:
St. John actively undermined racial justice, and filed briefs that argued against schools allowing race to factor into admissions considerations in Fair Admissions v. Harvard. She is also involved in litigation that attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in National Association of Scholars v. United States Department of Energy et al and State of New York et al v. National Science Foundation et al.
In Texas, Alliance for Justice’s website indicates that they also oppose the confirmation of Chris Wolfe and Andrew Davis, and they’ve so far posted a fact sheet highlighting Davis’s troubling record. In it, they note that Davis has “spent his legal career weakening corporate accountability, attacking civil rights, fighting workers and consumers, and undermining voting protections and environmental regulations.”
As Trump’s judicial nominees uniformly refuse to say that he lost the 2020 election, it is notable that Davis’s voting rights record includes the following:
Davis represented Fox News in one of the biggest defamation suits in history, one in which Fox enabled the spread of President Trump’s lies about the outcome of the 2020 election. Voting machine provider Dominion Voting Systems sued the media company for parroting Trump’s lies about Dominion voting machines being rigged to steal the 2020 US Presidential victory from Trump. Despite Fox News agreeing to pay Dominion $787.5 million and admit that its anchors made false statements, the lies they perpetuated continue to undermine American democracy and further election denialism.
Davis also defended Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s redistricting plan in Abbott v. Perez. According to Alliance for Justice, “Voters of color challenged the plan as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that violated the Voting Rights Act. Davis helped draft the briefs in this case and prepped the Texas Solicitor General for oral argument before the Supreme Court. The conservative majority sided with Davis and Texas, ensuring that large swaths of minority voters would no longer be protected by the Voting Rights Act in many of the ways Congress had intended. His work directly undermined their most important and basic democratic rights.”
Davis also clerked for Judge Sidney Fitzwater, whose nomination to the bench in 1986 was opposed by civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, because of his involvement in voter intimidation practices in Black neighborhoods in south Dallas.
Davis’s anti-voting rights record should be the subject of questions during next week’s hearing.
On their fact sheet, Alliance for Justice also notes that Davis has a record of reducing affordability for working families, undermining environmental accountability and protections, and attacking private rights of actions and undermining corporate accountability. This kind of background is not what our judiciary needs.
Some other notes
Alliance for Justice has not indicated at this time that they oppose John Thomas Shepherd’s confirmation to the bench. I briefly wrote about his nomination earlier this month, noting that he is the son of Judge Bobby Shepherd, who was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit by President George W. Bush. Shepherd is Trump’s second recent nominee whose father is an Eighth Circuit judge (Judge Duane Benton of the Eighth Circuit recently took senior status, and his daughter, Megan Benton, was nominated to a Missouri district court) — raising interesting questions about whether, and how, Trump may be trying to coax more judges into retirement.
And finally, some notes on demographic diversity:
If St. John is confirmed, Trump will have appointed 11 white judges in the state of Louisiana — where only eight lifetime judges of color have ever served.
If Shepherd and Clay Fowlkes (also nominated to the Western District of Arkansas) are both confirmed, Trump will have appointed more white judges in Arkansas than lifetime judges of color who have ever served in the state.
Davis and Wolfe would be Trump’s second and third appointees to the Western District of Texas — and all three are white men.
I wrote earlier this month about Trump’s dismal record on judicial diversity, including his refusal to nominate women of color to the federal bench during his second term to date. These nominees continue that appalling trend.