President Joe Biden appears to have a habit of picking judicial nominees with rather problematic, eyebrow raising remarks. As Gabe Kaminsky with the Daily Wire unearthed on Saturday, Nancy Abudu, who is Biden's appellate nominee for the 11th Circuit, made a litany of problematic comments in a post for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), including that we live in "a separate and unequal society" and that voting restrictions on convicted felons is "practically the same system as during slavery."
The post, from June 12, 2020, was highlighting how "On the 57th anniversary of Medgar Evers’ assassination, the march for voting rights continues." Medgar Evers was a civil rights activist who was killed on June 12, 1963 by a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
As Abudu mentioned in her post, with added emphasis:
Throughout my career, I have come to realize – like Evers did – that nearly everything in the multifaceted fight for civil rights boils down to this: Elected officials continue to promote policies that are totally at odds with their constituents’ needs and often violate their civil and human rights.
Unfortunately, we continue to live in a separate and unequal society as evidenced in our neighborhoods, schools, jobs and – perhaps most horrifying – in our prisons and jails. Our current criminal justice system is one of the most inhumane examples of how racial discrimination operates and can ruin people’s lives forever.
As we’ve seen in the cases of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others, it is a criminal justice system that can literally kill you.
When you add laws that prohibit people with a criminal conviction from voting, it’s practically the same system as during slavery – Black people who have lost their freedom and cannot vote. And without access to the ballot, a victim of the system cannot elect the very officials pulling the levers to hire the police, determine which cases are prosecuted and what sentences are imposed. As our recent report found in Alabama, there are many ways in which elected officials are still suppressing the vote in the 21st century.
Abudu is the Strategic Litigation Director for SPLC, a particularly polarizing organization which has listed many Christian and conservative organizations as "hate groups," such as Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the Family Research Council (FRC).
More recently, in a post from August 27, 2021, Abudu also called for "abolishing the filibuster" and claimed that "danger of not doing so is far too significant for our nation and generations to come" in order for the Senate to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (HR 4).
As I reported earlier, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has signaled that the Senate will vote to consider rule changes on January 17, in an attempt to pass the legislation, which would amount to a federal takeover of elections.
Sam Dorman with Fox News also highlighted other problematic comments Kaminsky touched upon that Abudu has made in the form of an October 5, 2011 interview with The Post and Courier, when she was with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). During the interview she claimed that showing "photo ID" and "proof of citizenship" amounts to "voter suppression."
When asked "what it is that you do," Abudu shared that "I would say 95 percent of my work is in voting rights, and it runs the gamut. ... Obviously, we do a lot when it comes to voter suppression, which includes five priority areas: photo ID, proof of citizenship, restrictions we see when it comes to registration ... early voting as well as absentee voting and the restrictions we see when it comes to criminal convictions. We also do a lot with student voting."
It's worth pointing out that a majority of Americans, across all demographics, support having to show photo ID in order to vote, and that support is actually growing.
Abudu was included in the list of announced judicial nominees on December 23. A report from Colleen Long with the Associated Press highlighted how Abudu "would be the first Black woman to sit on that court" and that Biden also nominated another woman of color, J. Michelle Childs, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
During the 2020 campaign, Biden made it a point to mention his commitment to picking women of color for his judicial nominees. He has also touted these selections during his presidency, as he did at the South Carolina State University commencement ceremony last month.
Abudu is hardly the only one of Biden's judicial nominee to make such controversial comments. As Spencer reported last month, there's Dale Ho, a judicial nominee for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. In 2018 Ho referred to the Senate and Electoral College as "anti-democratic" and doubled down on criticizing the Electoral College in 2019.