2018—“Progressive fury” (as CNN puts it) is unleashed on federal district nominee Wendy Vitter for declining to opine at her confirmation hearing whether she believes that Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided. Malicious charges spread that Vitter supports racial segregation.
Never mind that, like many other nominees, Vitter took the position that it was improper for her to comment on the rightness or wrongness of any Supreme Court ruling. Never mind that she committed to apply all existing precedents. Never mind that she testified that racial segregation is immoral. Never mind that no one identified anything in her life or career to suggest that she is racially biased. Never mind that she has earned the support of Democrats like New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu (who, among other things, called for the removal of city monuments honoring leaders of the Confederacy).
What many on the Left really object to—or so it would seem from the questions posed at the hearing by Senate Democrats—is that Vitter is openly pro-life.
2018—Federal district judge Manuel L. Real rules (in City of Los Angeles v. Sessions) that the Department of Justice, in administering a federal program to give grants to local governments to hire officers, cannot favor applicants who commit to address illegal immigration, and he enters a nationwide injunction against DOJ. Some fifteen months later, a Ninth Circuit panel will reverse Real’s ruling.
2019—Accepting the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law from his alma mater, the University of Virginia law school, federal district judge Carlton W. Reeves addresses what he calls the three “great assaults” on the federal judiciary. Reeves powerfully describes the first two assaults, in the Reconstruction Era and in the resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. But he then descends into rank partisanship as he decries the “third great assault on our judiciary,” which consists above all of tweets and comments by Donald Trump slamming various judges and rulings. There is plenty of room to deplore Trump’s comments without seeing in them anything remotely like the return of the Klan.