Today, Sharon McGowan, Legal Director and Chief Strategy Officer of Lambda Legal, issued the following statement after the U.S. Senate confirmed Allison Rushing, President Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit:
“Throughout her brief legal career, Allison Rushing has supported and closely associated herself with one of the most extreme anti-LGBT organizations operating in this country today, the Alliance Defending Freedom. Rather than disqualifying her from consideration, this aspect of her record seems to have made up for all of the other deficiencies in her record, including her inexperience and lack of any meaningful professional connection to the state in which she will sit.
"Despite her denunciation of the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision in United States v. Windsor, and her commitment to ADF’s mission to recriminalize homosexuality and sterilize the transgender community, all 53 Republican Senators voted to confirm her. Today is a very difficult and disappointing day for the roughly 1 million LGBT people who live in the states covered by the Fourth Circuit, and for all people who care about courts that can treat all people with dignity and fairness.”
Earlier this year, Lambda Legal released a report detailing Trump’s judicial assault on LGBT rights. The analysis outlines the ways in which Senate Republicans have eviscerated nearly all Senate rules and traditions that protect the nomination process, leading to an alarming rate of confirmations for Trump-appointed judges.
Trump has confirmed more circuit court judges than any other president by this point in his first term, and his administration shows no signs of slowing down.
