Even as President Donald Trump rushes to fill federal judge openings across the nation, a top Senate Republican is urging the White House to put the brakes on an outspoken nominee from Texas.
Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Tuesday that he told Trump to “reconsider” two controversial judicial nominees:
Jeff Mateer of Texas and Brett Talley of Alabama.
“I’ve advised the White House they ought to reconsider,” Grassley told CNN. “I would advise the White House not to proceed.”
Mateer, a top aide to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, was nominated by Trump to be federal judge in Texas. He has faced bipartisan criticism for a series of speeches in 2015 on homosexuality, including a reference to transgender children as part of “Satan’s plan.”
Talley, a Justice Department lawyer and candidate for a federal judge position in Alabama, has come under fire for urging readers in a 2013 blog post to join the National Rifle Association while attacking gun control legislation after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre as “the greatest attack on our constitutional freedoms in our lifetime.”
With no previous judicial experience, Talley became the third judicial nominee since 1989 to receive a unanimous rating of “not qualified” from the American Bar Association, a move that Republicans have decried as partisan.
See here for some background. That appeared on Tuesday, and by Wednesday Sen. Grassley had had enough.
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Republican said Wednesday that two of President Trump’s nominees for open seats on the federal bench will not be confirmed, just a day after urging the White House to “reconsider” them.
U.S. Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, said that based on his discussions with the White House, the nominations of Jeff Mateer and Brett Talley would not move forward through the confirmation process. The decision comes after reports that both nominees made public comments celebrating groups or policies that were discriminatory.
Good. Look, if you’re a Republican, surely you can see that you can do better than these two clowns. There are plenty of severely conservative potential judges out there who are also well-qualified for the job and are capable of acting like normal human beings. It’s really not much to ask, even from Donald Trump. Well, maybe it is too much to ask from Trump. In which case, voting losers like Mateer and Talley down might get the message across. Advise but don’t consent, in other words. Score one for a smidgeon of sanity.