OPINION:
Americans should be deeply concerned over the alliance between the Biden administration and the Southern Poverty Law Center, a self-professed civil rights group infamous for its aggressive targeting of conservative and religious organizations.
Lately, it seems as if President Biden’s FBI and Department of Justice are rewarding the group for that.
Americans were rightly shocked when a whistleblower exposed the FBI for targeting “radical traditional Catholics” based on criteria from the SPLC. This organization has inspired a left-wing domestic terrorist attack and has been exposed repeatedly for baselessly smearing its political opponents.
Mr. Biden recently nominated the SPLC’s strategic litigation director, Nancy Abudu, to be a permanent judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th District. Ms. Abudu’s confirmation hearing made it abundantly clear that her ties to the SPLC would affect her ability to fairly apply the law, especially toward those she disagrees with politically.
In addition to her support for abolishing the filibuster, Ms. Abudu refused to answer questions regarding her involvement in the SPLC’s abuse of the judicial process through judge-shopping (targeting specific venues to file cases solely in order to have them heard by a sympathetic judge).
Unfortunately, Ms. Abudu is no anomaly among Mr. Biden’s judicial nominees. If anything, she is the archetype.
Nominee Bradley Garcia for the D.C. District Circuit, for example, lacks experience and has a record of hostility toward religious liberty. Julie Rikelman, another Biden nominee for the 1st Circuit, is a pro-abortion extremist who argued — and lost — the Dobbs case. Nusrat Choudhury, Mr. Biden’s choice for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, is an anti-police activist opposed by a wide spectrum of police organizations across the country. Such blatant partisanship alone ought to disqualify a judicial nominee, yet compounding their ineligibility, some of Mr. Biden’s recent nominees can’t even answer basic constitutional questions.
Mr. Biden has a duty to nominate honest, well-educated and fair judges. Instead, he is prioritizing a radical political agenda at the expense of justice — and using the SPLC to help him do that.
I have witnessed the dangers of the SPLC’s extreme rhetoric firsthand. Nearly 11 years ago, I was working at the Family Research Council in Washington on what I thought was a normal Wednesday.
The safety my co-workers and I had felt was shattered when a deranged young man entered our lobby that morning with the intent to “kill the people in the building and then smear a Chick-fil-A sandwich in their face … to kill as many people as I could.” Thankfully, our office manager subdued the assailant before anyone was killed. Yet how had this unthinkable situation materialized in the first place?
In his interrogation video with the FBI, the man admitted that he had picked the FRC as a target because it was listed on the SPLC’s website, which claims to track “hate groups” but has been used more frequently to hatefully label conservative organizations. (The FRC was listed merely due to the organization’s traditional marriage views.)
That was not my last run-in with this extremist group. In 2017, five minutes after I left the field after talking to a number of Republican congressmen who were practicing for the upcoming congressional baseball game, a deranged gunman opened fire on gathered elected officials. He ended up severely wounding many, including now-Majority Leader Steve Scalise. This would-be assassin had “liked” the SPLC on his Facebook page, just as the FRC attacker had.
Disturbingly, the SPLC failed to learn from these near-fatal incidents. In 2018, the organization was forced to pay a $3.4 million settlement for labeling Maajid Nawaz, a British political activist, an “anti-Muslim extremist.” They were also compelled to issue an official apology for placing Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson on their “extremist watch list” in 2014. These embarrassing lawsuits further confirmed what many already knew — that as a political arm of the radical left, the SPLC was not an organization that nonpartisan government agencies could work with in good faith.
The ties between the Biden administration and the SPLC are alarming. They are also unacceptable at a time when our weaponized government agencies are already discriminating against conservatives and people of faith. Every senator should be held accountable for their vote on these judicial nominees. It is time to stand up for the fair application of the law, including when it comes to one’s political opponents.
• Tom McClusky serves as director of government affairs for CatholicVote. He has dedicated nearly 20 years to advancing religious freedom and advocating the protection of the unborn in the nation’s capital in his prior roles as vice president of government affairs for the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, and as the president of March for Life Action.
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