President Trumps New Judicial Nominee Is Moral Poison

[G_j]

http://time.com/5099446/donald-trump-judge-nominee-thomas-farr/

Picking a civil rights opponent while blocking two qualified African-American women

William J Barber II

1/11/18

President Donald Trump’s pick for a lifetime seat on the federal bench in North Carolina is the latest sign of how our politics have descended. A white man with a 30-year record of white supremacy receiving the unqualified support of the President and our state’s two U.S. senators, while two qualified African-American women cannot even get a hearing, is not merely bad politics. It is moral poison. More than 50 years after the passage of the now-defunct Voting Rights Act, how can North Carolina still be stuck in this moral ditch?


One prime reason is Thomas Farr, the Raleigh attorney Trump nominated for a judicial appointment to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. I’ve spent my whole life in North Carolina, and I know Farr. I know what he’s done, what he stands for and just how detrimental he will be to his constituents if confirmed.

Farr has been the lead attorney in a series of recent legislative efforts to suppress political participation by African Americans in the state. In 2010, Farr advised the General Assembly in what federal courts later termed a “racial gerrymander” of North Carolina House, Senate and U.S. Congressional districts. In separate lawsuits, each of these redistricting plans was determined to have discriminated against African-American voters.

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Farr began his career as a campaign aide to Senator Jesse Helms. Helms entered public life in campaigns that urged “White People Wake Up” and smeared the University of North Carolina as “the University of Negroes and Communists.” Helms was notorious for his diatribes against “Negro hoodlums” and “forced integration,” and for touting the “purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect.” He became the state’s most vociferous opponent of the civil rights movement, which, as late as 2005, Helms railed had “ripped away at the customs and institutions people cared about.”

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