Biden’s judicial nominee Nancy Abudu not helped by Atlanta Molotov cocktails
Quin Hillyer
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It is not too much of a guilt-by-association stretch to say that one of President Biden’s judicial nominees should lose even more support after an Atlanta mob on Sunday threw bricks, fireworks, and Molotov cocktails at law enforcement officers.
Biden’s nominee for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, Nancy Abudu, is the “strategic litigation director” for the radical Southern Poverty Law Center, a scandal-plagued organization infamous for its outlandish “hate map.” SPLC labels even thoroughly mainstream right-leaning organizations as “hate groups.” Abudu’s own record is so replete with untenable positions and statements that no intellectually honest person claiming anything close to centrism could possibly support her.
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To be sure, Abudu had nothing directly to do with Sunday’s violent attack against a construction site for an Atlanta police training center. That was the work of thugs affiliated with a group that claimed the “destruction of material” was acceptable because “all reported acts appear to be explicitly targeted against the financial backers & goons of the Atlanta Police Foundation, a shady nonprofit.”
One of those alleged thugs, though, was Thomas Jurgens, a staff attorney for the SPLC’s dubiously named Economic Justice Project. Even then, Jurgens’s involvement would not necessarily be a major mark against the SPLC, except that this association with radicalism is just par for the course for this left-wing outfit.
If an organization as widely discredited as SPLC wanted to regain a semblance of respectability, one overarching imperative would be to make sure it hires no radicals and that it makes clear to employees that extremist involvement won’t be tolerated. It would impress upon its staff lawyers to stay a million miles away from prominent hot zones such as the one near the Atlanta construction site, which already was rocked by violence just six weeks ago and for which more planned protests were well publicized.
Then again, after its scandals were so bad that its own former employees wrote about “SPLC nightmares,” nobody even within the outer bounds of the mainstream would go to work there unless such a person publicly said his or her goal was to reform and earn back what had once been the good reputation SPLC had (30 years ago).
Anyone who goes to work for such a group without a publicly reformist mission is fairly adjudged to be embracing the group’s mission and values as they now exist. Apparently, the SPLC’s mission and values seemed perfectly copacetic to the worldview of a guy such as Jurgens, who allegedly took part in violent protests. The bad apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Moreover, its rottenness may well stem from rot in the tree itself.
All of which bears indirectly, yet still not negligibly, on Abudu’s judgeship nomination. Abudu, to all appearances, is a proud leader of a legal team in a discredited organization that continues to attract discreditable people. It’s not as if Abudu works for the left-leaning but widely respected Brookings Institution and that one random Brookings employee went and did something abhorrent. No, Abudu chose to work for an organization that itself has turned abhorrent and never owned up to, nor apologized for, its abhorrence.
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A nominee who says radical things, advocates radical policies, and works for a radical organization should not be a federal judge. The Atlanta violence isn’t Abudu’s fault directly, but Jurgens’s involvement serves as a reminder that Abudu works for an organization where such disreputable radicalism is acceptable.
Biden should have withdrawn Abudu’s nomination long ago. He certainly should withdraw it now.