With his nomination of Amir Ali to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, President Biden continues his effort to radicalize the federal bench and sell out to dark money. Since 2021, Ali has been the president and executive director of the MacArthur Justice Center, a left-wing group that has publicly called to defund the police and aims to “transform” the criminal justice system.
The 2020 riots surrounding the death of George Floyd gave the Center the opportunity to showcase its “defund the police” agenda, which one of its spokespeople described as “a movement toward making police departments obsolete.” The group lobbied the New Orleans City Council to pass a resolution “committing to sharp reductions in law enforcement in the City’s 2021 Budget . . . and redirection of those funds to housing, health care,” and education among other priorities. The organization also supported the Black Lives Matter movement and in 2021 joined the Illinois BLM Uprising Defense in calling for the mayor of Chicago and state’s attorney to dismiss all remaining charges against rioters from the protests in Chicago.
The Center also has a National Parole Transformation Project tasked with “challenging the parole systems feeding mass incarceration” and aiming “to end the expansion of carceral systems of post-conviction supervision across the country.” Then there is the Marshall Project, which advocates changes in existing language as follows:
Instead of “inmate” or “convict,” use “incarcerated person,” “imprisoned people,” or “people in jail.”
Instead of “felon,” “offender,” or “parolee,” use “He was convicted of ____,” “They were placed on probation,” or “She is on parole.”
The Center began the month of February by hosting a panel discussion Thursday entitled “Dismantling Mass Incarceration: The Road Ahead.”
Ali was a founding board member and co-chair of the Appellate Project, an organization “committed to racial diversity, equity, and inclusion in the appellate field.” The Appellate Project is focused on implementing DEI in the appellate field and offers a Clerkship Handbook that encourages aspiring law clerks to apply to judges based on race, gender, and LGBTQ+ criteria. The bench needs impartial and unbiased judges, not zealous promoters of DEI practices that discriminate.
It should come as no surprise that President Biden’s announcement of Ali’s nomination has been applauded by Demand Justice and Alliance for Justice. For them and other leftist dark-money groups, it is impossible to be too soft on crime. But for those who will appear on the ballot this year, consider how politically tone-deaf they would need to be to support such a pick for D.C. District Court—located in the center of a city plagued by a violent crime epidemic. The choice of Ali is a brazen one given President Biden’s recent decision not to renominate Todd Edelman to the same court. Edelman’s nomination ran into trouble when his soft-on-crime judicial record came to light.
The Democrats who control the Senate by a razor-thin margin might think again whether to give a lifetime appointment to a nominee who heads a group that so brazenly tries to undermine law enforcement and the rule of law. A nominee committed to ignoring crime is dangerous. The last place he belongs is on the bench.