[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 84 (Thursday, May 18, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1729-S1730]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                      Nomination of Nancy G. Abudu

  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, today I rise to oppose the nomination 
of Nancy Abudu as President Biden's nominee for appointment as a U.S. 
circuit judge for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
  Now, in a government as divided as ours is at this time, we expect to 
have some controversial nominees that come before us at the Judiciary 
Committee. We expect debate; we do expect disagreement; but what we 
should never expect or tolerate is a nominee who has proven herself 
completely unfit for the role she is asking.
  Ms. Abudu has shown us that there is no such thing as a good-faith 
debate. She views disagreements over policy as evidence of bigotry. She 
describes herself as a radical legal activist and has compared her 
fellow Americans to Jim Crow-era racists and endorsed political 
violence against conservatives.
  She has stated that policing is--and I am going to quote her here--
the true threat to our collective safety. Hear me out on this. She has 
said that policing is--and I quote her--the true threat to our 
collective safety. She has embraced lawless sanctuary city policies and 
compared our criminal justice system to the horrors of slavery. These 
are her statements and her positions.
  I would be doing a disservice to our Federal, State, and local law 
enforcement officers if I didn't point out the rank hypocrisy of my 
Democratic colleagues' attempt to force this nominee through during 
National Police Week.
  Now, as I said, she feels like policing is a threat to our collective 
safety, but my Democratic colleagues, during this National Police Week, 
are choosing to push her forward.
  She used the significant power of her position within the Southern 
Poverty Law Center to weaponize charges of hate against her political 
opponents, all the while covering up blatant discrimination within her 
organization.
  Indeed, the Southern Poverty Law Center, every year, issues their 
``hate'' list. This should give everyone pause, but perhaps the most 
egregious example of Ms. Abudu's hostility toward the rule of law 
involves this very Chamber, those of us of each party who sit in this 
Chamber.
  In 2021, she engaged in a vicious mudslinging campaign in an attempt 
to manipulate the U.S. Senate into abandoning the filibuster and 
endorsing a radical overhaul of our Federal elections. Her campaign was 
so full of misrepresentations--and we will just call them falsehoods--
that even some of the most progressive Members of her party balked at 
what she was doing. This is the conduct that the Biden administration 
is seeking to reward.
  Justice is to be evenhanded; equal justice for all; one system of 
justice, not two tiers of justice. We must not tolerate what is 
happening here, and we must not approve this nominee.
  We had a great discussion in the Judiciary Committee about people who 
are unfit for the bench, unfit for public service, and the need to make 
certain that people are fit for this service. Ms. Abudu, by her 
actions, has proven herself to be unethical, unscrupulous, and 
completely untethered from any acceptable philosophy of law.
  To approve this nominee would be to rubberstamp a nominee who terms 
herself a ``radical leftist activist.'' It would rubberstamp a radical 
agenda. It would rubberstamp an activist judge. We don't want that on 
our courts, and this is something the American people have rejected 
repeatedly.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following articles be 
printed in the Record following the conclusion of my remarks.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

Nancy Abudu, Another Concession to the Far Left and to One of Its Most 
                       Disreputable Organizations

                     (By Carrie Campbell Severino)

       President Biden's judicial gifts to dark-money groups do 
     not end with Ketanji Brown Jackson or other far-left nominees 
     he picked for lower courts. Eleventh Circuit nominee Nancy 
     Abudu made her career in the dark-money realm since 2005, 
     when she joined the American Civil Liberties Union. She 
     worked for several years for the group's Voting Rights 
     Project, leaving just as another future Biden nominee--Dale 
     Ho--became its director. From there, Abudu assumed the post 
     of legal director of the ACLU of Florida.
       In 2019, after over a decade with the ACLU, Abudu joined 
     the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a once admirable 
     group that in recent years has been mired in scandal and 
     recognized as a racket that betrays its stated principles--
     not least by vilifying those it disagrees with as ``hate 
     groups.'' A number of liberals have acknowledged this, with 
     Nathan J. Robinson, founder of the left-wing Current Affairs, 
     calling the group's signature ``Hate Map'' an ``outright 
     fraud.''
       Abudu is the group's director for strategic litigation. A 
     wide-ranging coalition of over 50 organizations and 
     individuals protested her nomination in a letter to Senate 
     Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Durbin and Ranking 
     Member Chuck Grassley. They stated bluntly: ``Ms. Abudu works 
     for a disreputable organization that has no business being a 
     feeder for positions to any judicial office--not even of a 
     traffic court--let alone the second highest court system in 
     the United States. She is a political activist not a jurist 
     and is unfit to serve at the federal appellate level.''
       The Family Research Council (FRC) circulated the letter. 
     They have good reason to have sounded the alarm. They know 
     the real danger of being labeled a ``hate group'' by the 
     SPLC. As their letter to Durbin and Grassley explains:
       These destructive accusations have done real harm to many 
     people. In the first conviction under the post-9/11 District 
     of Columbia terrorism statute, the convicted terrorist was 
     shown to have been motivated by the SPLC's ``hate group'' 
     designation and related identifying information.
       In that case, SPLC materials facilitated a troubled young 
     man's delusional, and thankfully unsuccessful, plan to commit 
     mass murder. Using the SPLC ``hate map,'' this native of 
     northern Virginia targeted the Family Research Council (FRC) 
     and two other nearby groups in August 2012 for having beliefs 
     supporting traditional marriage. Fortunately, no one was 
     killed, although he did shoot and critically wound FRC's 
     unarmed building manager who subdued him while wounded.

[[Page S1730]]

       To make matters worse, the SPLC's leadership--Abudu 
     included--apparently haven't learned their lesson. ``[O]ver 
     the past decade the SPLC has targeted an increasing number of 
     policy groups with whom it has policy disagreements. Any 
     group that disagrees with the SPLC about positions it 
     advocates is deemed to be evil and worthy of destruction,'' 
     laments the coalition letter.
       In addition to its inflammatory designations, the SPLC has 
     amassed a war chest to fund its left-wing activism totaling 
     $570 million as of October 2020. Its holdings are, to put it 
     mildly, highly unusual for an American non-profit company. 
     Among investments listed in its 2020 financial statements are 
     $162 million in non-U.S. equity funds, $23 million in 
     ``arbitrage funds,'' $89 million in private equity funds, and 
     $7 million in long-short funds. The coalition letter 
     observed, ``The SPLC looks more like a hedge fund than a 
     public interest legal and political activist group.''
       Amy Sterling Casil, the CEO of the consulting firm Pacific 
     Human Capital, remarked regarding its transfer of millions of 
     dollars to foreign bank accounts that ``I've never known a 
     US-based nonprofit dealing in human rights or social services 
     to have any foreign bank accounts.'' She added, ``I know of 
     no legitimate reason for any US-based nonprofit to put money 
     in overseas, unregulated bank accounts'' and called the 
     SPLC's practice ``unethical.'' The watchdog group 
     CharityWatch gave the SPLC a grade of ``F.''
       In addition to Abudu's shady professional associations, she 
     consistently has taken far-left positions in litigation. 
     Perhaps the most prominent were cases Abudu argued while at 
     the ACLU's Voting Rights Center, for example, making 
     unsuccessful challenges to felon voting provisions in 
     Mississippi, Arizona, and Tennessee. As legal director of the 
     ACLU of Florida, Abudu unsuccessfully challenged the state's 
     requirement that a felon's voting rights could be restored 
     only after all fines, fees, and restitution imposed as part 
     of the felon's sentence had been paid. The Eleventh Circuit, 
     sitting en banc, found no evidence to support Abudu's claim 
     of intentional racial discrimination. Undeterred, Abudu 
     joined several other groups to submit Florida's law to the 
     United Nations Committee on Human Rights for review of human 
     rights violations.
       Since joining the SPLC, Abudu has maintained her ties with 
     the ACLU of Florida and continued her losing track record in 
     court with an unsuccessful Eighth Amendment claim against 
     Florida's Department of Corrections for not fully 
     accommodating a transgender inmate's ``social-transitioning'' 
     requests.
       The Biden administration and congressional Democrats 
     continue to make scurrilous allegations of suppression of 
     voting rights in Republican-led states, cherry-picking them 
     over Democrat-led states with more stringent election rules 
     and brazenly trying to weaponize the courts to do their 
     partisan bidding. And Biden's Department of Justice has 
     specifically targeted Georgia, where Abudu would sit if 
     confirmed, alleging the state's recent election law violated 
     the Voting Rights Act and engaged in racial discrimination. 
     If you believe a Judge Abudu would fairly evaluate Georgia's 
     voting integrity laws according to the rule of law rather 
     than her own agenda, I have a bridge to sell you.
                                  ____


                       [From AMAC, Feb. 15, 2023]

                         Biden's Radical Judges

                         (By Robert B. Charles)

       Watch the flank! Sometimes an assault on vital interests 
     and values does not come head-on, but from an angle, on the 
     flank. We just saw the Chinese slip a balloon across the 
     continent, figurative knife between the ribs. Domestically, 
     the judiciary is a flank--but it matters. Biden and Democrat 
     Senate are loading the federal judiciary with leftists, and 
     it matters.
       In the first year of his White House, Biden got the largest 
     number of Article III federal judges confirmed of any 
     president since Ronald Reagan. The difference is that many of 
     Biden's nominees aspire to concentration of federal power.
       Broadly speaking, they tend to tip against traditional 
     understandings and caselaw tied to unfettered speech, free 
     exercise of religion, gun ownership, traditional 
     understandings of family, parental prerogatives, due process, 
     equal protection, and the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments.
       His recent nominees are often openly pro-abortion, no 
     apologies for opposing Dobbs, happy to be activists--as they 
     think that is what courts are for, correcting errors of the 
     Founders, Congress, strict constructionists, textualists, and 
     those who dare to think words have meaning.
       While Trump got 234 federal judges appointed, that was 
     playing catchup after Obama's 329 judicial confirmations. 
     Now, continuing the leftist attack on our judiciary, Biden 
     has pressed increasingly radical judges--and one radical 
     justice--to the federal bench.
       When a Supreme Court nominee considers is controversial to 
     publicly define a women, simply declines to do so, something 
     is wildly wrong with the process. Imagine Justices Sandra Day 
     O'Connor (appointed by Reagan) or Ruth Bader Ginsburg 
     (appointed by Clinton) not knowing what a women is.
       Indeed, I think one can say--for very different reasons, 
     but with a basic understanding of and respect for biology--
     O'Connor, Ginsburg, Reagan and Clinton ALL knew the 
     difference between men and women.
       Now comes the latest rash of leftist nominees. After Biden 
     nominated 98 Article III judges in his first two years, 51 
     still awaiting confirmation, his left-lurching party now 
     controls the Senate, which is in charge of judicial 
     confirmations.
       Beyond this, we face 10 vacancies on federal circuit 
     courts--a bench that manages all federal appeals short of the 
     Supreme Court, plus 75 US district court vacancies. An added 
     27 federal judicial vacancies will arise before end of 
     Biden's term (four appeals, 23 district).
       The part that causes a shiver is not these numbers, but the 
     under- and un-qualified nature of those being nominated to 
     important judgeships. As one observer noted, this seems to be 
     Biden's means for ``paying back the left-wing dark money 
     groups who spent over a billion dollars to help elect him.'' 
     He will get the Democrat-controlled Senate to sweep a raft of 
     leftists onto the courts.
       Can he really do that? Yes and no. On the one hand, another 
     collection of unabashed leftists is about to be swept into 
     available openings, likely soon confirmed by the Democrat 
     Senate, most with a rich history of working with and for 
     leftist causes.
       These include nominees proud to have worked on left-leaning 
     cases that pushed pro-abortion, antigun, anti-free speech, 
     and anti-conservative causes and cases. They include those 
     who championed radical positions advanced by Planned 
     Parenthood, gun control groups, and those working to punish 
     free speech and worship.
       Last week two dozen nominees got through the Senate 
     Judiciary Committee, headed for floor votes. Among those to 
     watch are judges like Julie Rikelman, who was the 
     ``litigation director'' for the ``Center for Reproductive 
     Rights,'' headed for the First Circuit Court of Appeals. She 
     literally litigated against Dobbs, and lost.
       Another to watch is Nancy Abudu, who was a litigation 
     director for the Southern Poverty Law Center--after time with 
     the ACLU. She is destined for the 11th Cir. Court of Appeals.
       Even the typically quieter Republican National Lawyers 
     Association spoke against her which wrote that, ``Her views 
     goes beyond ... even progressive activists, and we see no 
     reason to believe that she will be an impartial judge on the 
     hot button' issue of election law.''
       A reality check will lower the blood pressure a bit, as 
     these judges will not--in one fell swoop--tip the balance of 
     these circuits, but the idea that judges who are unable to be 
     impartial on such a basic issue as ``election law'' are being 
     nominated--and confirmed--is worrisome.
       In the end, the core question is--what can be done, in an 
     age of polarized, often strangely off-the-mark thinking--to 
     protect the federal bench from becoming, over time, 
     radicalized?
       The answer is a few important things. First, level-headed 
     Senators can put holds on some of these nominees, tabling 
     them for a time, if not indefinitely. This will also send a 
     signal. For votes needed to tip the Senate balance, possibly 
     on fossil fuels, law enforcement, support for Ukraine, and 
     illegal immigration limitation--the point can be made to 
     centrists like Joe Manchin: Radicals must be kept off the 
     federal bench.
       In the event that radical appointees violate ethical norms 
     on the bench, impeachments can be initiated, driving home the 
     point that political activism is disallowed for federal 
     judges.
       Additionally, hard-hitting hearings of nominees should be 
     the norm, with radical, non-judicial behaviors, statements, 
     and past actions forcing Senate Democrats to tough decisions. 
     While accountability is hard, the effort is worthy--and even 
     some Democrats may balk.
       Last, all Americans need to think harder about the flanks. 
     As the Communist Chinese continue testing our national 
     security, the radical left tests our commitment to individual 
     liberty. Good judges are ``judicial'' in temperament, not 
     activist, not partisan, not political. Watch the flank!

  Mrs. BLACKBURN. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Peters). The Senator from California.