[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 188 (Thursday, November 29, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7198-S7199]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       NOMINATION OF THOMAS FARR

  Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, later this afternoon, the Senate is 
scheduled to vote on the confirmation of Mr. Thomas Farr for the 
Eastern District of North Carolina. I have made my opposition to this 
nominee clear on a daily basis, but allow me to remind my colleagues, 
to recap, before this vote just what we are dealing with here. We are 
being asked to confirm the go-to guy in North Carolina if you need a 
lawyer to defend voter suppression. Some might think that is 
hyperbolic, but I sincerely ask my colleagues not to go for hyperbole 
but to look at the evidence.
  Mr. Farr was the lead lawyer in defending North Carolina's 
discriminatory congressional maps drawn by the State's Republicans, 
which were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. This 
is a very conservative Supreme Court, which has been mostly 
unsympathetic to arguments of disenfranchisement--as evidenced by the 
Shelby County case--but in this instance, they could not help but 
overturn the map for racial discrimination, despite the evidence 
provided by Mr. Farr.
  Mr. Farr was also the lead lawyer in defense of North Carolina's 
insidious voter ID law, which the Supreme Court ruled ``targeted 
African Americans with almost surgical precision''--targeted African 
Americans with almost surgical precision.
  North Carolina's Republicans designed the law after asking for and 
receiving data sorted by race on voting practices. Mr. Farr not only 
defended the law, he described the voting restrictions, which forbade 
the use of government employee IDs, student IDs, and IDs used for 
public assistance, as ``a minor inconvenience.''
  That is only Mr. Farr's recent history involving voting suppression. 
If we go back and look at the campaign of Senator Jesse Helms in 1990, 
Mr. Farr represented the Helms campaign and defended it against 
accusations that it sent over 120,000 postcards, almost exclusively to 
Black voters, that falsely warned them they could be charged with a 
crime if they tried to vote--falsely--falsely warned them. The mailers 
were sent after statistics emerged that African-American registration 
was outpacing White voter registration.
  The sordid history of Mr. Farr's efforts to suppress voting goes back 
even further. Mr. Farr was a member of Senator Jesse Helms' 1984 
campaign. In that campaign, he wasn't merely a hired gun; he was a 
close legal associate of Senator Helms, a man David Broder of the 
Washington Post called ``the last prominent unabashed White racist 
politician in this country.''
  In that 1984 campaign, according to memoranda by the Voting Rights 
section of the Department of Justice, Mr. Farr was involved in the so-
called ``ballot security'' program run by the Helms campaign and the 
North Carolina Republican Party. The so-called ballot security program 
included sending postcards to minority voters in an effort to suppress 
voting.
  In 2006, Mr. Farr's association with these noxious voter suppression 
attempts by Helms' campaign was enough to deny him confirmation to this 
very seat. In the intervening years, he has not repented or even moved 
on to different issues. He is still defending attempts to 
disenfranchise African-American voters.
  I am not from North Carolina, but if I were, I would be embarrassed 
to have this man nominated and placed on the Federal bench. It takes 
but an ounce of principle to say: No, I am not defending discrimination 
and voter suppression. Yet, time and time and time again, not just 
1984, not just 1990 but 2013 and 2015, Mr. Thomas Farr has stepped up 
to the plate to represent and defend voter suppression in a court of 
law, and we are being asked to reward him--reward him for these 
activities--with a lifetime appointment as a Federal judge in a 
district that is 27 percent African American, where he will have the 
power to make decisions on voting rights and civil rights for a 
generation.

[[Page S7199]]

  I prevail upon the conscience of my Republican colleagues, who I know 
want to be fair to this man, look at the body of evidence impartially. 
There is simply a preponderance of evidence that Mr. Farr was involved, 
often intimately, in decades of voter suppression in North Carolina. 
The standard for this vote is not whether or how Mr. Farr should be 
punished or excoriated for what he did but a much higher one: whether a 
man with this history deserves to be elevated to a lifetime appointment 
on the Federal bench.
  Whether you are Republican or Democratic, a liberal or conservative, 
that has to be--has to be--disqualifying for a seat on the Federal 
bench.

                          ____________________