Fair Courts Project

Sharon McGowan, Director of Strategy at Lambda Legal, issued the following statement after Mitch McConnell filed cloture on Kyle Duncan, nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit:

Today, Sharon McGowan, Director of Strategy at Lambda Legal, issued the following statement in response to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s party-line vote to approve Howard Nielson, yet another Trump nominee with a significant history of anti-LGBT advocacy:

This week, Donald Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Minnesota Supreme Court Justice David Stras, had a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Like all of Trump’s extreme judicial nominees, Justice Stras presented himself to the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee as being capable of immediately relinquishing his longstanding anti-LGBT animus in order to become an impartial administrator of the law.

The record speed with which President Trump is reshaping the courts, coupled with the staggeringly high number of judges with anti-LGBT records whom he has nominated for lifetime appointments (nearly one-third of those nominated), is triggering a growing and vast judicial crisis for LGBT people, with sweeping consequences that will last decades after Trump is gone.