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In a party-line vote Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the nomination of Thomas Farr as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Who's Thomas Farr? He's the go-to lawyer for North Carolina Republicans. He's the guy the legislature there hired to defend the horrific voter-suppression law they passed in 2013.
That's the law that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down last year for targeting "African Americans with almost surgical precision." Farr had argued that there was not intent to cut out any voters based on anything other than the goodness of the Republicans' hearts. "I strongly deny that the legislature engaged in intentional discrimination," he said in arguments. "It was not a nefarious thing."
Farr appealed to the Supreme Court, saying “the decision insults the people of North Carolina and their elected representatives by convicting them of abject racism.” The court declined to hear the case, leaving the Fourth Circuit's opinion in place.
Farr has been at the center of fierce battles over voting and representation in North Carolina in recent years. He was hired by the North Carolina legislature in 2011 to defend its redistricting maps for Congress and the legislature, which have repeatedly been invalidated by federal courts. The Supreme Court struck down two of the state's congressional districts because the legislature had packed black voters into heavily minority districts in order to reduce the influence of minorities in adjoining districts held by white Republicans. A lower court also struck down twenty-eight state legislative districts for discriminating against African American voters, calling the maps defended by Farr "among the largest racial gerrymanders ever encountered by a federal court."
Need to know more about him? He was the lawyer for Jesse Helm's campaigns in 1984 and 1990. The 1990 campaign was sued by the Justice Department over a postcard mailing sent to 125,000 mostly African American voters telling them that it was illegal for them to vote if they'd moved in the 30 days prior to an election, and if they were caught they could serve as long as five years in jail. Farr, despite being the campaign's lawyer and having been fingered by the Raleigh News & Observer as in on the discussions leading up to the mailer, now says he knew nothing about it until after it was sent.
Here's another thing to know about this nomination, as pointed out by People for the American Way: "While Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were quick to rubberstamp Farr’s nomination today, it’s worth remembering that Republicans blocked not one but two highly qualified African American women to this seat. This seat has never been held by an African American in its 143-year history, yet the GOP was eager to prevent a historic first in order to hold the seat open for a nominee who has spent his career opposing equal justice under the law."
This is another judicial seat stolen from President Obama by Republicans. What's it going to take before Democrats on the Judiciary Committee decide to shut it down?