Trump nominates hyper-partisan conservative activist to NC federal court vacancy
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Last edited Tue Jul 18, 2017, 03:31 PM - Edit history (1)
Source: NC Policy Watch
By Rob Schofield - 7/18/2017
Sometimes all one can do is stand and marvel in slack-jawed wonder at the breathtaking brazenness, hypocrisy and double standards that Donald Trump and his allies in the modern conservative movement are willing to employ and embrace. Six months into this dark new era, it’s truly gotten to the point at which it’s hard to think of any political act under the sun that conservatives would be unwilling to engage in in order to pursue and accomplish their goal of radically overhauling the American social contract.
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Here in North Carolina, the steady decline in any pretense by legislative leaders of adhering to basic rules of process and open government stands out. So too does the startling willingness of self-described “Christian” conservatives to cozy up to Trump and his serial mendacity.
The assault on the courts
If one is looking for a specific realm of public policy in which this kind of behavior has been most blatantly apparent in recent years, however, it would be hard to top the ongoing conservative effort to seize control of the judiciary. As NC Policy Watch reporter Melissa Boughton has detailed on multiple occasions, the Right’s relentless effort to capture control of the courts in North Carolina has taken many shameless forms in recent months – from the aborted (at least temporarily) effort to pack the state Supreme Court, to the new law shrinking the Court of Appeals in order to deny Governor Cooper the right to appoint new judges, to the ongoing effort to gerrymander judicial districts to favor Republicans.
Trump nominates a North Carolina arch-conservative activist
Last week, the conservative courts putsch reached North Carolina when Trump nominated a right-wing activist lawyer named Thomas Farr to fill a seat on U.S. District Court for the Eastern District – the oldest vacancy in the federal system. As readers will no doubt recall, the Eastern District seat has stood vacant for more than a decade – including the entire Obama presidency – thanks to Senator Richard Burr’s stubborn refusal to allow either of President Obama’s two nominees to receive a hearing. Senate rules allow senators to block the consideration of federal court nominees in their own states by refusing to return what is known under arcane Senate rules as a “blue slip.”
Read more: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2017/07/18/trump-nominates-hyper-partisan-conservative-activist-nc-federal-court-vacancy/
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