Packing the courts: Farr - Part 2

Last year, President Donald Trump nominated Thomas Farr, a Republican lawyer based in Raleigh, to be a federal judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina, which spans 44 counties from Raleigh to the Atlantic coast. He has a long history of representing the state against voting rights groups accusing it of discrimination against voters of color. In 2013, North Carolina’s GOP-controlled Legislature hired Farr to defend a sweeping set of voting restrictions that a federal appeals court ultimately struck down for targeting black voters “with almost surgical precision.” The North Carolina Legislature also hired Farr to defend redistricting maps for Congress and the state Legislature that have since been invalidated in court, with one federal panel calling the state legislative districts “among the largest racial gerrymanders ever encountered by a federal court.”

[...]

The seat on the US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina has been vacant since the end of 2005, the longest judicial vacancy in the country. President Barack Obama nominated two African Americans to fill the seat, but they were blocked by Republican senators. Though the Eastern District is more than a quarter African American, there has never been a black judge there.

  Mother Jones

It seems particularly heinous - i.e. Trump era Republican - to bring his nomination to a vote at this point, just after midterms that were awash in the South with voter suppression.

In 1984 and 1990, Farr served as campaign lawyer for Helms, whom the Washington Post‘s David Broder called “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.” In 1990, when Helms faced off against former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, the city’s first black mayor, the North Carolina Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to predominantly African American households falsely telling them it was a crime to vote if they moved within 30 days of the election, with a punishment of up to five years in jail.

The Justice Department sued the Helms campaign, saying the postcards were designed “to intimidate and/or threaten black voters in an effort to deter such voters from exercising their right to vote.”

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In response to a written questionnaire, Farr denied any involvement in the mailings or knowledge of them until he was contacted by the Justice Department. He said he “was appalled to read the incorrect language printed on the card and to then discover it had been sent to African Americans.”

But notes kept by Gerald Hebert, who served as deputy chief of the voting section at the Justice Department in the 1990s, show that Farr participated in a meeting with Helms campaign officials in October 1990 to discuss “ballot security” efforts and advised the campaign on what to do. “Farr also denied he had ‘any role in the drafting or sending of the postcards,’” Hebert told HuffPost. “But he did discuss the issue of sending the postcards three weeks before they were sent. I would describe that as playing some ‘role.’ He also denied flat-out that he did not ‘participate in any meetings in which the postcards were discussed before they were sent.’"

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Senate Democrats believe the vote will be close. Schumer said that every Senate Democrat opposes Farr’s nomination. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) has vowed to oppose all of Trump’s judicial nominations until the Senate votes on his bill to protect the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, so only one more Republican senator would need to defect in order to sink Farr’s nomination.

Good luck finding another GOP Senator willing to do that.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.