Opinions

A bad federal judge anywhere hurts courts' integrity

We witnessed scores of problems related to voter suppression and other restrictions on the right to vote in this mid-term election. Many practices were challenged in federal court, which hears claims under the Constitution, the Voting Rights Act, and other voter protection laws. These courts stand as the final arbiter of our rights. Accordingly, the courts must be independent and fair.

Public confidence in the judiciary is essential to its operation. Litigants must expect that justice will be dispensed fairly. They must know that the decisions they are ordered to follow are based on law, facts and fairness, not politics or ideology. Just as importantly, judges on these courts must be perceived as impartial. When judicial nominees demonstrate bias against certain communities, there will be a loss of faith in the courts as an institution.

That is what makes President Donald Trump’s nomination of Thomas Farr to a North Carolina court so alarming. Farr is one of approximately 140 people nominated to the federal bench by Trump. The Senate has already confirmed 84 nominees, and three dozen more are in the queue when the Senate returns from Thanksgiving recess.

Even among Trump’s most controversial nominees, Thomas Farr stands out because of his record of hostility on racial justice issues. The NAACP strongly opposes the Farr nomination, as does the National Urban League, the National Bar Association and many others who support fairness in our judiciary.

Thomas Farr is nominated to the Eastern District of North Carolina. Although home to many of the state’s African-American residents, this district has never had an African-American judge in its 144-year history. This is in stark contrast to our federal courts in many other states these days, many of which have been integrated for decades.

It’s not just that Farr is a white nominee to an all-white bench in the Deep South. Thomas Farr hails from an era our nation was supposed to have put behind us. Early in his career, Farr teamed up with North Carolina’s segregationist Senator Jesse Helms and then devoted a lifetime to undermining civil rights at every turn, even long after Jesse Helms was gone.

Through Jesse Helms and his allies, Farr had early ties to the Pioneer Fund, one of the nation’s oldest hate groups founded in 1937 to study “racial betterment.” The Pioneer Fund supported research into theories advocating that African Americans were genetically inferior to whites, which is the very definition of “white supremacy.”

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Farr was also involved in Jesse Helms’ political campaigns, nationally known for their racism. Most alarming is that Farr engaged in voter intimidation himself. In 1990, Helms’ opponent for Senate was Harvey Gantt, the first Black mayor of Charlotte. The Helms team, which included Farr, conspired to intimidate African Americans from voting by sending them postcards, suggesting they were ineligible to vote and warning they could face prison time for voting. The conduct was so egregious that George H.W. Bush’s Justice Department charged them with Voting Rights Act violations. Farr was squarely in the center of the unlawful activity.

Farr has worked to disenfranchise African American and other racial and ethnic minority voters up until today. He defended congressional and state legislative redistricting challenged under the Voting Rights Act and failure to comply with the National Voter Registration Act. He crafted and then defended North Carolina’s voter suppression law that was the most draconian in the nation. The Fourth Circuit struck it down because it was intentionally discriminatory and targeted African Americans with “almost surgical precision.”

The justice system works only if the people it serves believe it is impartial. Like many Southern courts, civil rights cases are a mainstay of North Carolina’s federal docket. Even before plaintiffs in these cases walk through the door of Judge Farr’s courtroom, they will presume that their case is doomed, based not on facts and fairness, but on Farr’s longstanding record of racial hostility. We must protect that court and every court from the stain of bias and prejudice. When Farr comes up for a vote by the Senate next week, Alaska U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan should vote to protect the integrity of the justice system. They should vote no on Thomas Farr.

Kevin McGee is the president of the Anchorage chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.

Kevin McGee

Kevin McGee serves as president of the NAACP in Anchorage.

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