Supporter --
A DISASTROUS Trump judicial nominee is set to receive a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee TOMORROW!
Can you help us get to 50,000 signatures before the hearing tomorrow to REJECT Howard Nielson?
A message will be emailed to senators on the committee letting them know you want them to OPPOSE Nielson.
Nielson's radical view of the law makes him dangerous to constitutional rights and values, dangerous to checks and balances, and dangerous to our system of justice and our democracy.
Thanks for speaking out!
-- Katie
Previous message:
Sign the petition: Tell Senators to OPPOSE narrow-minded Trump nominee Howard Nielson>>
Dear Supporter,
We have some bad news, some good news, and some even better news.
First the bad: We've got another unfit, right-wing Trump judicial nominee having a hearing TODAY: Howard Nielson. While Nielson's demonstrated contempt for the rule of law might make him a desirable choice for Donald Trump, it also makes him one of Trump's most unfit court nominees and should disqualify him from a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.
Now the first good news: At the end of last year, we were successful in STOPPING another three of Trump's worst judicial nominees -- nominees who, like Nielson, were beyond the pale in terms of their unfitness for the bench … so we know that it can be done.
And the even better news: Because of the election of Senator Doug Jones in Alabama and a tighter Republican-Democrat split in the Senate, it was just announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee would add a Democratic member! The new party divide on the committee is 11 Republicans to 10 Democrats (better than the previous 11-9 split) and two new Democrats who are very strong on judges have been assigned to the committee -- California's Kamala Harris and New Jersey's Cory Booker. This should give Democrats on the committee more leverage and ability to stop Republicans from rubber-stamping Trump's disastrous nominees like Nielson.
Howard Nielson's record is beyond flawed … and that's exactly why Trump likes him.
- Nielson was part of a "Screening Committee" involved in the DOJ's politicization under President Bush, via a hiring scandal around interns and non-political positions. An Inspector General investigation at the time found that "candidates with Democratic Party and liberal affiliations" were weeded out of the hiring process for civil servants and resulted in the Inspector General stating that the perpetrators of this scandal -- like Nielson -- "should never get a job with the Department or, in my view, any other Federal agency." He's now nominated by Trump to a LIFETIME seat on a federal court!
- In representing the proponents of Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative amending the state constitution to strip same-sex couple of the right to marry, Nielson urged a federal district judge to throw out the original district court ruling striking down Prop 8 on the basis that its author -- then-Judge Vaughn Walker -- was gay! This smacks of the same sort of obscene bigotry displayed by then-candidate Donald Trump when he insisted that Judge Gonzolo Curiel, overseeing the Trump University fraud lawsuit, was incapable of dispensing justice because of his Mexican heritage.
- Nielson worked in the Bush-era Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) where he authored a memo asserting that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply to United States actions that occur outside of American territory or land under formal American occupation -- a conclusion that war crimes expert and former State Department official Beth Van Schaack wrote would "virtually gut" the treaty.
- At the OLC, he was part of a team that used dubious legal reasoning to provide cover for the Bush administration's use of torture and argue that the president could ignore statutes passed by Congress and treaties that banned torture.
And that's only a sampling!
Nielson is UNFIT to serve as a lifetime appointment -- sign the petition demanding that the Judiciary Committee reject this nominee>>
Thank you for demanding that judges respect the rule of law and uphold the Constitution.
-- Katie O'Connell, Digital Communications Coordinator
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