Past writings haunt Trump’s Indian-American pick for judge
WASHINGTON:US President Donald Trump has re-sent a list of judicial nominees including Neomi Rao, who has come under fire for past writings in which she partly blamed women victims of daterape, described race as a “hot, money-making issue” and LGBT issues as “trendy”.
Rao, currently Trump’s deregulation czar in the Office of Management and Budget, was nominated to replace Brett Kavanaugh on the court of appeals in Washington in November.
But her nomination expired with the last Congress. Questions were raised if she would be re-nominated in the aftermath of the controversial writings that had surfaced since.
Rao’s nomination is attracting close scrutiny also because she has been reportedly added to the White House’s list of potential nominees for the Supreme Court, if and when a slot falls vacant.
The writings go back to her days at Yale and at the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine that closed recently. A list of these articles was compiled by a liberal advocacy group Alliance for Justice and distributed to news publications last week.
In an article in the Weekly Standard in 1996, Rao wrote critically of two African-American scholars and said they “position themselves above the corporate hype. Race may be a hot, moneymaking issue, but even … (one of the two men) seems to realise that it can be talked to death”.
In a 1994 article in the Yale Herald, Rao wrote that “a good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober”.