Republicans accuse Bar Association of bias

Trump disregards ratings when picking nominees

WASHINGTON – In their quest to fill the federal courts with conservative judges, President Trump and Senate Republicans have found an unlikely bogeyman: the venerable American Bar Association.

Founded in 1878 and once led by three future Supreme Court justices, the nation’s largest lawyers organization has for 65 years quietly screened the men and women nominated for lifetime appointments to the bench.

For about half that time, the group’s ratings have been the subject of controversy — accused by Republicans of favoring the nominees of Democratic presidents while giving a hard time to conservatives such as Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.

This year, that battle has come to a head. Trump, like President George W. Bush before him, has chosen his nominees without first seeking the ABA’s seal of approval. Senate Republicans have ignored several negative reviews — most recently confirming the second nominee in three decades to be unanimously rated “not qualified” because of his temperament.

As they look to double down on this year’s record number of federal appeals court confirmations — and possibly put someone else on the Supreme Court alongside Trump’s first pick, Justice Neil Gorsuch — Republicans increasingly are discounting the officially impartial ABA reviews first requested by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953.

“The American Bar Association is not neutral. The ABA is a liberal organization that has publicly and consistently advocated for left-of-center positions for more than two decades now,” Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said on the Senate floor last month.

That’s OK, Sasse made clear — as long as the group doesn’t claim neutrality when its 15-member standing committee on the federal judiciary ranks nominees. “If you’re playing in the game, you don’t get to cherry-pick who the referees are,” he said.

Bar Association leaders vehemently dispute that its broader role infects its judicial reviews, a point they have made to the Senate Judiciary Committee on multiple occasions. “The ABA’s evaluation of these candidates does not consider the nominees’ politics, their ideology or their party affiliation and has found unqualified candidates put forth by both political parties,” ABA President Hilarie Bass said.

The final straw for Senate Republicans was the ABA’s unanimous “not qualified” rating of L. Steven Grasz, a former chief deputy attorney general of Nebraska nominated by Trump in August to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.

One of four nominees to be dealt that negative rating, Grasz’s was unusual because it was based not on credentials but his temperament and perceived bias. A vocal opponent of abortion, he was viewed as “gratuitously rude” by some of the 207 people contacted by the ABA committee. His conduct toward opposing lawyers was deemed to be “bordering on incivility.”

The only person to receive a similar denunciation from the ABA in the past 30 years, Mississippi attorney Michael Wallace, withdrew his name from consideration in 2006. This time, Republicans pushed Grasz to the bench on a party-line vote.

“Nothing more than a hit job,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said of the ABA’s review.

“A baseless political character assassination,” chimed in Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb.

Ed Whelan, president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, turned the spotlight on the ABA’s judicial review process. Writing in the National Review, he labeled the University of Arkansas School of Law professor who conducted the initial review, Cynthia Nance, a “lefty black female investigator.”