Senate GOP taking up judicial nominee some call 'the worst'

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Daniel Dale Retweeted

Good morning. The Senate is voting today to advance Thomas Farr's nomination. He built a career out of weakening voting rights for black ppl. Now he's poised to be a lifetime federal judge.

Dems need 1 more GOPer to vote with them to tank his nomination.

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Senate GOP taking up judicial nominee some call ‘the worst’

BY KEVIN FREKING
Associated Press

November 26, 2018 12:05 AM
Updated November 26, 2018 12:06 AM

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans are working to soon fill the nation's longest judicial vacancy with a North Carolina lawyer whose nomination has raised objections from black lawmakers and civil rights groups concerned about his work defending state laws found to have discriminated against African-Americans.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has helped push 84 of President Donald Trump's nominees over the finish line and is itching for more. With just a few more weeks to go before Congress adjourns for the year, he has teed up a vote on the nomination of Thomas Farr, 64, to serve as a district court judge in North Carolina. ... The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Farr's confirmation with a party-line vote back in January, meaning McConnell has waited about 10 months and until after the midterm elections to hold a vote on the floor.
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Farr also helped defend a 2013 law that required photo identification to vote, reduced the number of early voting days and eliminated same-day registration during that period. ... North Carolina Republicans said that requiring voter ID would increase the integrity of elections. But the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the state provided no evidence of the kind of in-person voter fraud the ID mandate would address. The Richmond, Virginia-based court said the law targeted black voters "with almost surgical precision."
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The history of the particular judicial opening Farr would fill has also contributed to the acrimony. ... President Barack Obama nominated two African-American women to serve on the court, but neither was granted a hearing and their nominations stalled. If confirmed, they would have been the first blacks to serve in that particular district, which is about 27 percent black. ... Farr also served as a lawyer for the re-election campaign of Republican Sen. Jesse Helms in 1990. The Justice Department alleged that about 120,000 postcards sent overwhelmingly to black voters before that election was intended to intimidate them from voting.
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This Guy Is a Hack Too Far

Thomas Farr, an ambitious vote suppressor, was nominated for a spot on the federal bench.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
NOV 27, 2018

Comes now another test for Ben Sasse, and Susan Collins, and all the other Republicans who are terribly dismayed over the vandal in the White House, and what he is doing to our precious national dialogue and to our democratic institutions. How's about you all get together and fight like hell to keep this gombeen off the federal bench. It's bad enough that Mitch McConnell has made it his life's work to salt the federal judiciary with larval Scalias, but this guy, Thomas Farr, whose entire career has been as a kept Republican lawyer, and who was primarily responsible for a voter-suppression plan that a court said targeted minority voters "with almost surgical precision," should really be a hack too far, shouldn't he?

Ben?

Susie?

Anybody? Is this thing on? Hello?
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