Susan Collins wants a voter suppression guru to be a federal judge

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is backing one of the most divisive and racist judges Trump has ever nominated for the federal bench.

With this move, Collins is abandoning all pretenses of being a moderate and proving that she fully embraces the sordid Trump agenda.

Thomas Farr has engaged in a “lifetime crusade to disenfranchise African-Americans and deprive them of their rights,” Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau, told NBC News.

So naturally, Trump nominated him for a seat on a federal court.

By supporting Farr’s nomination, Collins is standing with Trump and against the voting rights of millions of African-Americans.

As a North Carolina attorney, Farr played a key role in drafting a racist North Carolina voter ID law that, according to a federal appeals court, was written to disenfranchise black voters “with almost surgical precision.”

Farr also defended racially gerrymandered districts, which multiple courts struck down as illegal.

As far back as 1990, Farr was an attorney for the re-election campaign of notorious racist Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC). That year, the Helms campaign sent out 120,000 postcards to primarily black voters which were “intended to intimidate them from voting,” according to NBC News. Farr denies any knowledge of the activity.

“It is no exaggeration to say that had the White House deliberately sought to identify an attorney in North Carolina with a more hostile record on African-American voting rights and workers’ rights than Thomas Farr, it could hardly have done so,” the Congressional Black Caucus wrote to the Judiciary Committee.

This is the type of person Collins wants to give a lifetime appointment to a federal court.

Collins’ unequivocal support for such an awful Trump nominee should come as no surprise, though. After all, she offered a full-throated defense of alleged sexual predator and raging right-wing partisan Brett Kavanaugh, giving the Trump nominee a crucial swing vote to send him to the Supreme Court.

After a disastrous midterm election for the GOP, Collins will be the only Republican from New England returning to Congress in January.

Loyalty to Trump doesn’t seem to go over well with New England voters. And with Democrats eyeing Maine in 2020, when Collins is up for re-election, she might find that out the hard way.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.