Senators urge Trump to eliminate ABA from federal judicial nomination process

The process of nominating judges to the federal bench has long been fraught with all sorts of political landmines, and a group of Republican lawmakers are now urging President Donald Trump to take a drastic step to help curb that troubling phenomenon.

As Fox News reports, a group of GOP senators has recommended that Trump cut the left-leaning American Bar Association (ABA) out of the judicial nomination process entirely, labeling the group “biased and ideologically captured.”

Senators urge ABA's ouster

Spearheading the push to boot the ABA are Sens. Eric Schmitt, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley, Bernie Moreno, and Mike Lee, all of whom have called upon their colleagues in the upper chamber to “disregard the ABA's recommendations when it comes to judicial nominees.

Several senators signed a letter to ABA president William Bay outlining their concerns which, taken together, led the group to urge all lawmakers to “disregard the ABA's recommendations, as well as ratings of judicial nominees and pending legislation.”

The letter also explains the group's decision to “call upon President Trump and the Department of Justice to remove the ABA from the judicial nomination process entirely.”

The group accuses the ABA of making “inflammatory claims about the Trump Administration without citing legal reasoning,” particularly in the realm of proposed cuts to USAID, adding that the organization stood silent when President Joe Biden defined the Supreme Court on student loan relief.

Lawmakers who signed the letter also lamented the “divisive, cultural Marxist DEI and woke initiatives” they say the ABA has embraced in recent years, including mandating DEI training at law schools and promoting racial quotas in clerkship hiring.

Potential end to decades of involvement

As attorney Michael Fragoso explains in an op-ed for City Journal, the ABA's involvement in the judicial nomination process has endured for more than 70 years, and for much of that time, it was presumably nonpartisan in nature.

The ABA, he notes, began rating nominees for judicial roles back in 1953, under the presumption that the practice helped presidents select “qualified” candidates and steer clear of misguided – and embarrassing – choices.

By the 1980s, cracks in the ABA's credibility began to emerge, as it labeled distinguished conservative jurists such as Robert Bork and Frank Easterbrook “not qualified.” During the Biden administration, Fragoso explains, the group “completely abandoned its standards,” giving the “qualified” rating to a nominee who was unable to explain the purpose of Article V of the Constitution during a confirmation hearing.

Now that the organization seems to have gone all-in on an “increasingly left-wing” philosophy, Fragoso argues, it is now time for Trump to end its traditional participation in the nomination process.

“If the ABA wants a Republican administration to cooperate,” Fragoso writes, “it needs formally and publicly to renounce its left-wing turn. Until then, the Trump administration -- and Senate Republicans -- should treat it like the political foe that it is,” but whether those ties will indeed be cut by the current White House, only time will tell.