GOP senators grant lifetime judgeship to a raging bigot

Senate Republicans on Wednesday forced through Trump’s nomination of Matthew Kacsmaryk, a staunch opponent of equal rights for LGBTQ Americans and women, to sit on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

Kacsmaryk received a yes vote from all but one Republican despite his bigoted views. Every Democratic senator who voted opposed his nomination.

The vote was 52-46 for Kacsmaryk, who is 42, to receive the lifetime appointment.

Kacsmaryk served as general counsel for the First Liberty Institute, which is dedicated to denying LGBTQ people equal rights.

While working for the institute, Kacsmaryk expressed support for a number of bigoted causes and crusades.

He was a signatory to a 2016 letter that called being transgender”a delusion.” In 2015, he said adding protections for LGBTQ people to the Violence Against Women Act a “grave mistake.”

“Kacsmaryk fought against protections for LGBTQ people in employment, housing and health care,” HuffPost reported Wednesday.

Kacsmaryk also attacked the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe vs. Wade decision, which guarantees women the right to an abortion.

In a 2015 article on Roe, Kacsmaryk wrote that the court “found an unwritten ‘fundamental right’ to abortion hiding in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the shadowy ‘penumbras’ of the Bill of Rights, a celestial phenomenon invisible to the non-lawyer eye.”

His nomination was opposed by a large coalition of advocacy groups supporting LGBTQ and reproductive rights, who expressed alarm at his extremist positions and beliefs.

“Mr. Kacsmaryk’s history of targeting those who do not live according to his particular social and religious beliefs calls into doubt his ability to administer fair and impartial justice,” the groups wrote in a letter sent to the Senate last Thursday.

Among the 75 signatories to the letter were Lambda Legal, NARAL, National Black Justice Coalition, the National Organization for Women, The Trevor Project, and the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Despite these pleas and Kacsmaryk’s troubling track record, Republicans put him on the federal bench, where he will likely make decisions affecting the lives of millions of LGBTQ people, women, and their families.

Trump has nominated dozens of extremist judges for lifetime federal appointments, and these nominees — many of whom are objectively unqualified — have been seated by Senate Republicans under the leadership of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Trump has been able to nominate an unusually high number of these unqualified, extremist judges because McConnell blocked many of President Barack Obama’s judicial appointments — most notably the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland.

Kacsmaryk’s appointment shows once again that Republicans in Congress are more than willing to march in lockstep with Trump to pack the judiciary with extremists.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.