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| Candidate Donald Trump said he supported lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. President Donald Trump is eroding those rights in a number of ways, including by putting anti-LGBTQ judges onto federal courts. |
Yesterday Pat made an interesting comment on my post A Step Backward.
In a Constitutional Republic these issues rest first with Congress and then with the courts... In due time change will come and it will be better if it comes with the force of law rather than the opinion of a governmental administrative fiat.
Pat makes a very good point and in theory I agree. However there needs to be a balance.
Almost 10 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the US Supreme Court in the 1954 landmark decision "Brown v. Board of Education Topeka" declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. In the rehearing of the case in the fall 1953, special attention was given to the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
In his reading of the unanimous decision, Chief Justice Warren noted the adverse psychological effects that segregated schools had on African American children. Source Wikipedia
There are times when the courts must be in front of legislators, whose only clear motivation is re-election. This is why reasonable judges are so important. The judges that Trump is appointing could well be his lasting legacy - and not a pretty one at that. Read on:
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Trump Is Filling Court Seats With Anti-LGBTQ, Anti-Abortion Judges
WASHINGTON ― Thursday (October 5) was a good day for Amy Coney Barrett. A Senate committee voted to advance her nomination to be a federal judge.
It wasn’t a pretty vote. Every Democrat on the Judiciary Committee opposed her nomination. They scrutinized her past writings on abortion, which include her questioning the precedent of Roe v. Wade and condemning the birth control benefit under the Affordable Care Act as “a grave infringement on religious liberty.” One Democrat, Al Franken (Minn.), called her out for taking a speaking fee from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit that’s defended forced sterilization for transgender people and has been dubbed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But Republicans don’t need Democrats’ votes, and now Barrett, a 45-year-old law professor at the University of Notre Dame, is all but certain to be confirmed to a lifetime post on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit — a court one level below the Supreme Court.
Barrett is the model judicial candidate for this White House: a young conservative opposed to abortion and LGBTQ rights. For all the stories about President Donald Trump using his executive power to roll back civil rights protections — in the past day, his administration axed the ACA birth control benefit and ended workplace protections for transgender people — it is here, on the courts, where his team is working most aggressively to reshape the country.
“Trump’s speed in nominating judges has been perhaps the most successful aspect of his presidency,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who specializes in judicial nominations. “Trump has easily surpassed Obama, Bush and Clinton at this point in the first year of their presidencies in terms of the sheer number nominated.”
