Today, Sharon McGowan, Director of Strategy at Lambda Legal, issued a statement on Leader McConnell’s legacy of judicial nominations after the Senate voted to invoke cloture on the nomination of Michael Brennan, Donald Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
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:
The Oregon Supreme Court today affirmed a determination by the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability that Judge Vance D. Day had violated state rules of judicial ethics when he devised a scheme to avoid marrying same-sex couples by instructing court staff to investigate the gender of marriage applicants and represent that he was unavailable if they were of the same sex, among other charges.
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.
Today, Sharon McGowan, Director of Strategy at Lambda Legal, issued a statement in response to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s vote to approve 23 nominees.
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.
Today, the United States Senate handed Leonard Steven Grasz a lifetime appointment to the federal bench on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, despite being one of only four nominees since 1989 to receive a unanimously unqualified rating by the non-partisan American Bar Association.