While Democrat pundits and their accomplices in corporate media sow chaos surrounding the presidential campaign, the Biden-Harris administration and Senate Democrats are furiously trying to fill the Judiciary with some of the most left-leaning radical nominees ever to set foot in a Senate hearing room.
Among them are Embry Kidd, Karla Campbell, and Julia Lipez, and just within the last three weeks, they have all been added to the Senate calendar awaiting their votes for confirmation.
Federal Magistrate Judge Embry Kidd, nominated to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, failed to disclose in his nominee questionnaire the fact that at least two of his rulings in child sex crimes cases were later reversed.
In U.S. v. D’Haiti, Kidd ordered a defendant to be released from pretrial detention who had been arrested for possession of child pornography. The defendant, a cheerleading coach at the time of his arrest, was also accused of reaching his hands up a minor’s sports bra and fondling her. But Kidd, according to the court records, chose to release the defendant based on his “high character,” “ties to the community,” and “lack of criminal history.” A district judge later reversed that order and the defendant was ultimately sentenced to 29 years in prison for coercing a minor to produce sexually explicit content.
In U.S. v. King, Kidd similarly released a convicted sex offender charged with possessing child sex abuse material and issued an order restricting only some of the defendant’s usage of the internet and devices. A district judge later revoked Kidd’s initial order based on the danger he posed to the community and a “compulsion that he cannot control.” The district judge concluded there were no conditions “that can assure the safety of the community” and was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
Another troubling Biden-Harris judicial nominee is Karla Campbell, who has never served on any bench, yet was nominated to the Sixth Circuit. Campbell previously supported radical individuals and organizations and then claimed at her confirmation hearing to have no knowledge of the hateful views of those to whom she donated significant time and money.
In 2022, Campbell donated $1,500 to Tennessee congressional candidate Odessa Kelly days after Kelly baselessly accused Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee of racism. During the hearing, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) shared some of Kelly’s tweets as examples of her radical views, including one in which Kelly compared President Donald Trump and other elected Republicans to Hitler and “the Devil himself.”
In addition, Campbell served as a longtime legal adviser to Workers’ Dignity, a group that has taken positions most Americans would find shocking, including a 2020 tweet from Workers’ Dignity calling to, “Abolish ICE. Abolish prisons and detention centers. Abolish police.” The group also posted a tweet encouraging “revolution,” not peaceful protest, when it wrote: “Building the multiracial, working class revolution is the only way we will ever end the ... capitalist violence that is responsible for the exploitation, murder and genocide of our people.”
In addition to taking radical, progressive policy positions, Workers’ Dignity is an antisemitic group that supports Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel.
Throughout her confirmation hearing, Campbell repeatedly tried to downplay her involvement with Kelly and Workers’ Dignity, but the facts paint a dramatically different picture than the explanations provided to Committee members.
A third Biden-Harris nominee, Judge Julia Lipez, outraged Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committeewhen asked to defend her decision to suspend half the 12-year prison sentence of a convicted child molester as a Maine Superior Court judge during her recent First Circuit confirmation hearing. According to public reporting about the sentencing, and highlighted during her testimony, she responded of the man who sexually abused two girls under the age of 10, “What I can say is that this is a very tragic situation of a person who has a lot of good in him having done a very reprehensible thing to two young children.”
When Sen. Kennedy repeatedly asked Lipez to defend her decision to treat a child sex offender with kid gloves, she dodged the questions, causing Kennedy to conclude: “You have more sympathy for criminals than victims, don’t you?” he asked.
When asked to defend their records, all three downplayed, obfuscated or avoided doing so, and yet they await Senate confirmation for lifetime appointments to the federal bench.
Given Democrats’ narrow Senate majority and their recent inability to move nominees forward, it would seem politically prudent for the White House to put forward more moderate candidates, particularly in light of Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) insistence not to approve nominees who can’t earn a single GOP vote.
Instead, the Biden-Harris administration insists upon reshaping the Judiciary to inflict their unpopular, Left-wing, soft-on-crime agenda on Americans for generations to come.
Marc Ellinger is Chairman of the Republican National Lawyers Association.