The left-wing dark money group Demand Justice, weighing in on the judicial nominations front over the next four years, just made a stunning admission. The organization’s managing director, Maggie Jo Buchanan, remarked that “we have no evidence . . . that we will see that the administration can be trusted to put forward nominees that will prioritize people over the law,” according to a Bloomberg Law report. “So that’s why it is really important in this moment, before judges are announced, before debate begins, to make that proactive case about what it means to be qualified to sit on our federal courts.”
To admit that the organization wants judges who “will prioritize people over the law” is quite the statement. The role of a judge is to follow the law. Full stop. Not that we should be surprised that Demand Justice is literally advocating for judges who will not follow the law, given what we have seen from the organization over the years. They started as a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund in the dark-money Arabella Advisors’ network and have long viewed the courts as a vehicle for imposing progressive policies. Their founders called for picking for the bench “lawyers who represent workers, consumers, or civil-rights plaintiffs, or who have studied the law from that vantage point.” Demand Justice’s short list for the Supreme Court reflects its policy priorities, the importance of which tends to be inversely related to the amount of supporting constitutional text. And the group has had no compunction about leading the fight to pack the Supreme Court or to bully Justice Stephen Breyer to retire so that President Biden could replace him with a younger progressive. Institutional vandalism comes easily once constitutional vandalism is deemed acceptable.
Demand Justice issued a press release last week asserting that reports of “Senate Democrats . . . expressing openness to supporting Trump judges” are “nothing short of concerning.” And of course this dynamic is common among the Left’s other prominent dark-money groups that advocate on judicial nominations. The justice program director at Alliance for Justice remarked, “It is unfathomable to me that Democrats would work with Republicans at all on judges after their Republican colleagues treated them with such contempt and bad faith.” Actually, there is no Republican counterpart to Democrats’ slander campaigns against judges from Clarence Thomas to Brett Kavanaugh or the threats and outright intimidation against judges progressives find disagreeable.
For the moment, just consider what it means that the Left would tell Democratic senators that they should vote against Trump judicial nominees, sight unseen, before a single one has been submitted. Why are they not asking, as JCN did, for senators to simply vote against nominees who are not committed to following the law? Apparently it’s because Demand Justice and its allies view willingness to depart from the law as a feature, not a bug.