12/18/2017
Republican Senator John Kennedy took a stand against hiring unqualified Judges nominated by the Trump administration. In an embarrassing blow to Trump, the senator asked Mathew Peterson about his qualifications, and the answers provided stunning evidence of how little Trump cares about seating qualified Federal Judges.
Prior to his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Peterson was asked to complete a questionnaire regarding his qualifications. Peterson wrote in the questionnaire that he’d never appeared “in court due to the nature of my legal practice.” Why Trump and his staff thought he would make a good Judge is a mystery, unless you consider how Trump has come across his other nominees.
As it turns out, loyalty is far more important to the Trump administration than is a nominees actual ability to perform their job. One just needs to look at Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry as proof. Secretary Perry at one time wanted to eliminate the department he now oversees, and admitted just days before his Senate confirmation hearings that he didn’t even know what the Department of Energy did.
In regards to nominating Federal Judges, the Trump administration has kept up the same policies, and nearly all nominations are based on ideology rather than merit or experience. The man Trump has put in charge of finding nominees is White House Counsel Don McGahn.
It is not unusual for the White House counsel’s office to play a role in judicial nominees, but more as a tool for vetting than for nominating. That’s because there used to be more senatorial guardrails on the nomination process. McGahn has exerted an outsized influence over the nation’s judiciary. He has put loyal allies in key positions at the Department of Justice and he has taken the leading role in pushing nominees for the bench.
Petersen was his protege. The two served together at the FEC, during which time McGahn orchestrated and received a remarkable degree of ideological obedience. The three Republican members were lockstep on virtually all voting matters. When Trump won and plucked McGahn as his top lawyer (after having been the campaign’s counsel), the alliance continued. On page 40 of his questionnaire, Petersen admitted that he found out he was a candidate for the judicial vacancy after being “contacted by the White House Counsel’s Office.”
He’s not the only nominee with such an origin story.
Brett Talley, another infamous and failed judicial nominee, is the husband of McGahn’s chief of staff—a fact he failed to disclose on his own questionnaire. In addition, Talley was exposed as having blogged under a pseudonym about the KKK and chased ghosts around haunted properties in Alabama. McGahn’s deputy, Gregory Katsas, was nominated and confirmed to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. And Kyle Duncan, who was nominated to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, was pushed so hard by McGahn that it grated the senators considering his nomination.
Among them was Kennedy who said he had “first learned about Mr. Duncan’s nomination when I received a phone call, actually a series of phone calls from Mr. Don McGahn.” Those calls, Kennedy added, weren’t pleasant. And during the confirmation hearing, the bitterness clearly lingered. At one point, Kennedy challenged the nominee to prove that he was “the second coming of Justice Holmes or Justice Scalia, and not the second cousin of somebody who is politically connected in the Washington swamp.”
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