Republicans in Washington have waged a war against the American Bar Association, the nation’s largest association of legal workers, amid the organization putting out a sweeping and defiant statement criticizing the Trump administration‘s actions.
Republican senators called for President Donald Trump to excise the ABA from the judicial nomination process, and Attorney General Pam Bondi took aim at its authority over law school accreditation. These moves came against the backdrop of the Trump administration more broadly targeting what the White House has said is the politicization of “big law.”
“We have a serious problem in this country, which is that the American Bar Association, our major university law schools, and our major law firms have become an instrument of the hard Left,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said in a recent television interview, adding that “big law” has attempted “to turn law into an instrument of political repression for too many years.”
The ABA, established in the late 1800s, has grown into a sprawling organization that touts a membership of over 400,000 legal workers. It claims to be the “national voice of the legal profession,” weighing in on nominations of federal judges, engaging in litigation, and influencing hiring processes in other areas of the legal industry. A siloed-off part of the ABA handles law school accreditation, setting standards for universities and sparking controversies when those standards wade into political territory.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), an outspoken legal voice in Congress, blasted the ABA this week as a “radical left-wing advocacy group.” Lee joined a handful of his Republican colleagues in writing a letter to the ABA’s president condemning the organization for embracing “woke initiatives,” including its heavy use of diversity, equity, and inclusion in many facets of its work.
Judicial nominees
The Republicans, most of whom are on the panel that vets judicial nominations, said they would no longer consider the ABA’s ratings of prospective judges, which they said functioned as mere “endorsements” for Democratic-aligned nominees. Since the Eisenhower administration, the ABA has typically been given a heads-up on candidates for the federal bench and evaluated them as unqualified, qualified, or well qualified.
Republican lawmakers have boasted in the past about the ABA’s positive evaluations of their preferred candidates, such as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who received the highest rating the organization gives. But numerous conservative appointees have also received negative or mixed evaluations.
The GOP’s grievances with the ABA date back decades. The George W. Bush administration ended the practice of giving the ABA a first look at nominees, setting off a pattern in which Democratic administrations brought the practice back and the first Trump administration halted it again. The ABA has maintained that it will rate the nominees regardless of whether it is given early access to them.
The Republican senators called on Trump to stop referring to the ABA for the nomination process again — and if the past is any indication, Trump may be receptive to their request.
‘Alienation of many conservatives’
Right-of-center lawyers, such as George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, have said the ABA’s membership is diminished despite the organization still doing “many admirable things.”
“Part of that decline may reflect the ideological bias of the organization,” Turley told the Washington Examiner. “The ABA once eschewed taking positions on political or ideological issues. It now regularly weighs in on such issues and is viewed as an overwhelmingly liberal organization.”
The ABA promotes Democratic-aligned viewpoints, such as “LGBTQ+” initiatives, support for abortion access, and DEI.
“There are good-faith disagreements over constitutional interpretations, but the ABA often speaks for the members on adopting positions with its largely liberal leadership,” Turley said. “The result has been the alienation of many conservative, libertarian, and moderate lawyers.”
South Texas College law professor Josh Blackman has frequently made similar observations and has urged the ABA to elevate members to its internal committees who span the ideological spectrum.
“As the ABA drifts further and further away from the regulation of the legal profession, and focuses more and more on achieving progressive societal goals, the organization’s mandate dissolves,” Blackman warned in 2023.
Trump administration
Trump’s recently confirmed attorney general, Pam Bondi, has also taken aim at the ABA.
Bondi wrote a warning letter last month to its Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, a powerful part of the ABA that operates independently of the rest of the organization and is the sole body to dole out law school accreditations.
The council has “for years” imposed “unlawful race and sex discrimination” on law students and staff “under the guise of ‘diversity’ mandates,” Bondi said. She said that while she was glad the section’s Standard 206, which requires schools’ “commitment to diversity,” had recently been suspended, it should be repealed entirely.
More broadly, the Trump administration is seeking out entities in the legal industry with Democratic ties, a move that comes as Trump has torn into lawyers working to help his political enemies or hinder his efforts to reshape rapidly and slim down the federal government through mass firings, abrupt contract terminations, and spending freezes.
Trump signed executive orders stripping two major law firms of security clearances, Perkins Coie, which aided former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and Covington & Burling, which Politico reported has been helping former Trump prosecutor Jack Smith. Individual lawyers have also drawn Trump’s wrath and been told they have lost security clearances, including prominent Democratic lawyer Norm Eisen and longtime lawyer Mark Zaid, who has represented clients in national security lawsuits across the political spectrum for years. Some of the lawyers and firms on Trump’s target list have already signaled they are pushing back on the president through lawsuits.
Trump himself has not directly addressed the ABA’s role in judicial nominees, but the organization’s statement last week signaled it is displeased with the new administration.
The ABA’s president wrote that he is seeing from the Trump administration “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself, such as attacks on constitutionally protected birthright citizenship, the dismantling of USAID and the attempts to criminalize those who support lawful programs to eliminate bias and enhance diversity.”
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When asked for comment on Republicans’ criticisms of the ABA, an organization spokesman pointed to the ABA accreditation council’s letter responding to Bondi.
In it, the council said its controversial Standard 206 “has been suspended and is not being enforced.” The council also reiterated that the section of the ABA that deals with accreditation is walled off from the rest of the ABA. The ABA has not responded to the GOP senators.