Undoing Christian Nationalism In The Courts

[Music] [Music] welcome to ffrf's ask an atheist i'm liz covell associate counsel at the freedom from religion foundation here in madison wisconsin and i'm mark dan director of governmental affairs at ffrf in washington d.c with us today is jen bendree a senior politics reporter for the huffington post she's covered congress the courts and the white house for the huffington post since 2011. she previously reported on congress for four years for roll call for roll call a capitol hill newspaper and spent four years covering the texas legislature for gallery watch in austin jen can be found on twitter at jaybendry we had jen on the show earlier this year but due to technical difficulties a lot of our ideas were unable to be expressed we're honored that jen has come back to ask an atheist she'll talk about what we can expect from the biden administration with court reform and judicial nominees and how we can overcome trump's judicial legacy we one of our favorite things about jen is she is an agnostic who feels very at peace at nature and as always if you have questions for jen or us ask them in the facebook comments or you can send an email to ask an atheist ffrf.org remember ffrf is a 501c3 non-partisan organization so we happily accept donations um and we do not and cannot take sides in partisan elections don't necessarily endorse any partisan views that might be expressed here but of course um the topic is somewhat political we're talking about judicial appointments and of course the potential for court reform so um we we're going to talk a little bit about what we talked about in our previous show with jen and hopefully um get to hear some of what jen's perspective is on these issues but like a lot of organizations last year ffrf published a report in december discussing the threat to secular government that's facing us thanks to the court packing that was done over the past uh four years in the previous administration with ultra conservative judges you can still check out our report at ffrf.us judges that will pull up our report on christian nationalism in the judiciary and um the massive threat that's posed by just how many judges were appointed and rammed onto the federal courts from the district courts all the way up to the three judges that were put on the supreme court so we're talking to jen about that problem and the potential solutions she's been covering the courts uh for years and politics as well um so uh mark i don't know if you want to ask your first question some of this is repetitive from last time but jen just give us your thoughts since we didn't quite get them last time all right yeah and there's plus a lot of ground to cut a lot of ground to cover we've in here in washington it has been a very active few months which kind of gets to the whole point of it of what we're discussing today which is undoing christian nationalism in the courts so jen you've been covering the courts for years it has been a wild six months we saw the death of ruth bayer ginsburg and then amy bone amy coney barrett's confirmation trump's last-minute push to secure more lifetime judges the election of biden and harris the january 6 attack and now we're awaiting biden's first slate of judicial nominees how are we going to describe this to future generations without them thinking we're absolutely crazy well there's a lot you just packed into those last several months um and there's different things happening there i mean a lot of activity happened with the courts and then separately there was this whole insurrection at the united states capital and uh there was some overlap there with timing but um in my mind those are so in some way they are all connected actually but um it's been a rough go in dc i can say that people are still you know still reeling from the insurrection i mean people who don't live in dc watched on tv and and saw how awful it was and then you time moves on trump has left biden and harris are back you know not back they're in the white house and things are moving on a different track but it's still we still have all the same republicans in congress who basically enable the president to get to that point and they're moving forward as if that didn't happen and it's to me is underlying everything that we do in this congress now is that we must not forget that there are 147 republicans currently in congress who voted to overturn the election after the capital insurrection that must to me as one reporter that has to underscore everything that we report on in dc when these people cast votes or give floor speeches they actually voted to undermine democracy right after an interaction so we can't just move on from that and i hope that we don't as a media at large and we factor that into everything that we do whether it's votes on judges votes on legislation floor speeches we cannot separate any of it from what we just witnessed that said on the courts yes there was also a lot happening uh you saw after trump lost a mad dash by republicans to just push through in whoever as many judges as they could we all watched as rbg passed away and then uh mitch mitch mcconnell who was then the senate majority leader um raced through to get amy coney barrett confirmed which was a complete 180 on his previous stance that you shouldn't confirm a supreme court nominee in a presidential election year and this was just weeks away from the election so that was a total flip-flop by mitch mcconnell and the entire senate republican party so that all happened and by the end of trump's term we saw a record number of judges confirmed just incredible quantity on the supreme court of course i think did you trump get three i honestly can you remember anymore is it two three three it doesn't matter because he got so many more on the us appeals courts and then he got even more on district court so there was a huge push for years by mitch mcconnell and the federalist society with trump essentially as their pawn to get these people through it was decades in the making moment that is over now we have the biden administration in office and you can expect something very very different in terms of the direction of where biden will be going with the courts so that's like a perfect jumping-off point to sort of talk about i can't remember when we last had you on and when we were talking about um i think we were sort of like prognosticating about the new administration maybe it was january or so um but we're like 50 some odd days into the new administration what there's all this urgency from progressives and people like us who care about you know secular laws um and democracy what are you seeing um and hearing on the hill and in the biden administration about progress towards filling seats we know that that there was all this urgency towards this um after the courts were packed and continued during the lame duck session like what are you hearing about um you know the the sort of what the biden administration is doing to combat that with just appointments um what do we know about the commission on court reform like what's moving in these first 50 days essentially nothing is moving right now but that's only that's only on the front end um there's a lot of movement happening on the back end and by the back end i mean there's a lot of vetting going on at the white house there's a lot of vetting going on through the department of justice of judicial nominees and it can feel a bit like okay there was such a such an urgency to um flipping back the courts you know from the direction that trump took them in you know in in the context of what democrats want to see and so you have this mad dash by by republicans to fill as many seats trump is gone they did their their deeds on the courts biden's in democrats controlled the senate this is their window so there is this kind of sense of like hurry up and wait like people are a little bit anxious and by people i mean progressive groups are anxious to see judicial nominees start getting announced start getting hearings start moving through the system to start to see that that biden is actually going to do something tangible to push back on all this the sometimes like totally unacceptable judicial nominees that trump put through um but here we are in late march and um it can feel like it's been a very long time of waiting but in fact biden is not behind schedule if you want to compare him to where past presidents were at this time in their presidency in terms of putting forward the first batch of judicial nominees that said there's been a lot of background activity happening and i think that biden is expected to announce either one or his first batch of judicial picks pretty soon and and the white house has been pretty quiet about the timing of what they're doing or which courts they're looking at filling first or if they want to make a statement with the first nominees that they put forward which you would think that they would want to do to kind of their entree into you know the judicial nominations process make a big splash have some really historic nominees um but for the moment there's no one coming through that i know of and the the bar was essentially defined to me by some people who talked to the white house is that biden wanted to wait a to get this covered relief package through congress that was the big priority at first so that happened so then the next thing was he wanted to get his cabinet secretaries confirmed so i think i could be wrong but i think we may have just finished that we've got deputy level cabinet picks coming through now but i there may be one or two potential cabinet picks left but i think we've just gone through the vast majority of them if not all of them so that means that we can expect biden to start putting forward judicial nominees any day now i just don't know when i don't think anybody knows when exactly and there's just a lot of anticipation because people want to see something happening after what we all witnessed from the last four years which was a drastic push to the right on the u.s courts on all levels of federal courts and progressives in particular are just eager to see a total shift in the people we're putting on courts and to see a real diversity of nominees which trump absolutely did not have he had a lot of white men who were young and conservative and had very ideological views about women's bodies and abortion rights and gay rights and all the things so there's a lot of anticipation right now there's not any visible movement yet but i think something is going to be happening i mean it sounds to me like in the next week or so so i know you've covered this jen and i've been reading a little bit about um the the push for diversity and me as a lawyer this is of interest to me and i'm a public sector lawyer you know we one of the things we know about um all of trump's most of trump's judicial nominees and appointments is that they were overwhelmingly male they were overwhelmingly white um but one of the things that is less talked about is that they they overwhelmingly come through the legal and up through the legal profession through kind of one walk of life which is you know private sector traditional legal jobs which means they're not often from the ranks of public defenders and public sector lawyers people that work for civil rights organizations like the aclu um and the freedom from religion foundation um and so can you talk about sort of the push for diversity of professional diversity um within the bench and whether and how um that can be balanced with sort of the urgency to get these seats filled so is this your bid to make yourself available yes i would like to say that's where this is actually headed okay yes it's important to note that i am ready to assume a seat on the federal bench you are ready to be an appeals court judge um so uh you actually do kind of fit the bill for for what biden claims to want um and you're right there's there's a lot of different ways of defining diversity of judicial nominees and typically you know democrats have sort of talked about in terms of race or gender or um i don't know like religion you know the kind of like the social context of you know defining a person but professional diversity has really not gotten much attention until very recently and by professional diversity to your point it's it's this idea that you don't only have corporate lawyers be picked to be lifetime judges and whether you want to look at trump's judicial nominees who were you can say all kinds of things about but there was one relative constant with his nominees and even obama's nominees is that most of them were corporate lawyers and so it's not as if obama was a big champion on professional diversity either he was very good on he made a lot of historic uh judicial confirmations in terms of nominating black women or or asian you know asian judges for the first time ever on a certain bench or the number of women in general that he he put through or lgbtq judges i mean he broke all kinds of he had all kinds of firsts with his judicial nominations in the context of race and gender and religion but things like professional diversity are just really painfully absent from the federal bench so biden has come into office claiming that this is something he really cares about and it's it appears to be more than just talk because i got a hold of a letter uh back in december from his white house um lead counsel that went to every you every democratic senator essentially saying all right guys you need to hurry up and send us judicial recommendations now because we want to have these all cued up and ready to go you know this is december we want to have our people ready to go in january after buying this born and we want to have people on the queue to start moving forward with and ps one thing we really want you to do as senators who have a huge role at picking who judges are we want people with backgrounds that are not just corporate lawyers we want people who are public defenders we want people who are civil rights attorneys we don't want people who are from ivy league schools necessarily we want people who are just diverse from background in backgrounds because that's the kind of diversity you want reflected in the courts that hear from our diverse population and we just don't have that so i think you know as someone who covers the courts and judicial nominees in particular the idea that professional diversity is actually gaining traction is a is a huge deal you don't hear democrats championing this hardly ever the only senator who i've heard ever pushing for this was elizabeth warren and that was years ago and she even went out on a limb and dinged president obama at the time for for not doing enough on this front and i actually ran into elizabeth warren yesterday in the senate and i brought it up and she was late to a hearing or a meeting her aide was tugging her arm they had to go but i mentioned that i was working on a story about professional diversity among judicial nominees which might sound super boring to the layman but to elizabeth warren she was like whoa and she made her aide sit there stressed out and let her talk to me for like at least 10 minutes pretty effusively about why this needs to be a bigger issue but how she's been talking to the white house about it about how she's personally talked to senators about the need to recommend judicial nominees to the white house that are women of color that are women or people who have backgrounds in human rights law and civil rights law people who went to state school and it might not sound like that's that complicated but if you if you were to spend the time going through all of our federal judges and looking at their backgrounds absolutely by and large the vast majority went to ivy league schools and have corporate law backgrounds and so the idea is we're going to move away from that under obama and i actually think it's not just talk and that is like pretty exciting for someone who cares about this stuff yeah that's actually really encouraging and just coming from the you know the public sector lawyers experience it's like what are we talking about when we talk about um a non-corporate lawyer and it's really there's so much diversity in terms of what your life experience can be obviously um but even as a lawyer what your life experience can be um is so vastly different you know you're just you're there are so many different ways to be a lawyer and when you're coming from a public defender background or a civil servant background or a government lawyer background you are interacting with clients individual human beings people whose needs are really different who interact with the legal system in very different ways at different times and it just gives you a perspective that um you don't think of um you know when you think of lawyer judge you don't realize how much can potentially be missing if someone was following a one-track you know corporate law ivy league school corporate law judge ship ship path um you know you don't necessarily want that same profile of person deciding every single you know thing that affects all of our lives no and i think it's important for people to to understand why this stuff matters because talk about the courts can feel so dry and boring and removed from our regular lives but you know the thing to keep in mind is that you know federal judges are often the last say and especially on the appeals courts they're often the last say in a federal court case they're the last landing place for a federal case by and large to in other words let's think about the number of cases that um the supreme court hears which we always talk about versus appeals courts the key is that the u.s appeals courts resolve 50 000 cases a year roughly that's compared to about 100 cases resolved by the supreme court every year so that's the last spot like that's kind of the last stage of most federal cases is the appeals courts and so if you're going to have a consistent bench of by and large white male corporate lawyers who particularly the trump administration have backgrounds that are very hard line um ideological right-wing extreme that's any and then you put into you know then you consider the fact that these are this is the last often times the final say in a federal court case um that tells you who's deciding the laws of our land yeah and it matters no it does matter and the concern is that people who don't have a diversity of backgrounds they're not familiar with the legal needs of everyday people who might maybe they're living with low incomes or you're otherwise marginalized in your community based on you know you're a minority or you're um you're in a socioeconomic status that is you know not rich and white so the idea that you would have judges that have backgrounds in civil rights or working with low-income families like they want to actually understand and relate to their the people who come before them which is the whole point is you want judges to reflect the people who come before them and we don't have that in the context of the professional diversity we have ivy league white men by and large well it's encouraging that that's being um really seriously um prioritized by the new administration um mark i want to kick it to you we're already 20 minutes in do you have any kind of hill perspective questions that you wanted to ask jen um about the courts and where we're at a lot a lot of them jen you talked a lot in your introduction about the january 6th attack whether and also that the face of the courts more so are straight white christian men who ha especially from the trump administration from very conservative backgrounds so do you think there's a connection between the january sixth attack and trump's that the push from the trump administration and mcconnell to get a certain type of judge onto the bench and what they're doing about it i mean i think there's you can't i mean i can't say yes that like there's a connection to all the judges on the courts from trump and a bunch of white supremacists violently attacking the capital to kill lawmakers to prevent them from certifying an election i mean that's like that's it's just so complicated on what brought us to that moment but um i think that if there is a thread it's that it's that for for starters trump himself does not did not care really about anything from a policy standpoint he wanted two people to like him and he wanted to to be able to say he won things so that's that's all he really cared about was winning right so he won on the courts in his mind mitch mcconnell funneled through all of his nominees the federal society gave him nominees he was just a pawn essentially he did not care or know about any of his judges that can that were confirmed on his watch let's just be clear about that so if he doesn't care about anything except winning uh he won the courts and that will be one of his continued talking points it's like i i look what i did to the courts i redid the courts he also only cared about winning re-election and he didn't and he lied and lied and lied about you know the election being stolen and spreading lies about that and so the misinformation uh about the election and trump's general disposition about just lying to make himself look like a winner that is the only threat in this moment i can see beyond um you know the ideological extremism of some of trump's judicial nominees but i i i'm not going to say that his judicial nominees are aligned with the insurrectionists or um you know that the insurrectionists were guided by the same thing that is guiding trump's traditional nominees it's they both have serious problems uh with what was going on with their thinking you know in terms of why would people attack the capitol building and try to kill lawmakers and separately why would judicial nominees be put onto the federal bench who think that abortion is like slavery or um you know that transgender people are the devil i mean so there's there's extremism in both camps i guess is what i'm trying to get at there's extremism in both camps but you can't really connect a literal interaction with you know some ideologically extreme judicial nominees who are not there attacking capitals yeah and i think important to point out i mean i'm not handing out like courage medals or anything but important to point out that um every single federal judge that heard one of these like completely fiction-based um lawsuits about election fraud during um the post-election period found them to be baseless including um conservative uh appointees and trump appointees so i mean that's true and that shows you that there is some limit i mean a there was like zero evidence for any of trump's lawsuit so it was something like 65 cases or more that went to court about the election that every single one of them was was struck down by federal judges of all you know political persuasions there's simply no evidence of anything so there's that but there's also this idea and this is probably a broader point to make about judges is that sometimes when a judicial nominee goes through the process and they seem particularly extreme and ideological and perhaps worrisome to you if if you are let's say a progressive democrat and you see a very right-wing ideological judge being put into a lifetime court seat sometimes what happens is judges hit the bench they're done with the process they're in their seat for life and they actually they care more about adhering to law and being a fair-minded judge than then perhaps their their background would make you think that they would there's a certain and i i'm saying this not as a judge i'm not a judge but i have talked to federal judges about this and there's this idea that for many people who are put onto the federal bench you take it seriously and you're not just there to be like a political hack you know with a partisan agenda you actually are you take a vow and you care about following the law so there's that and that's that's important to consider when looking at any judicial nominees but that said of course every judge brings their own experiences and their own perspective to interpreting the law and law is going to be interpreted so it's it's kind of a mix of those two things that that are important to keep in mind with judges that of course no judge is totally objective and law is not hard and fast and you know there's going to be interpretation of law based on your perspective but at the same time judges are proud to be judges and they take pride in it and they want to do you know carry out a fair lawsuit or you know oversee a fair case and feel like they are contributing to the the greater good in some sense so all this to say you have to always factor in those two pieces when looking at judges in my opinion yeah i mean sorry mark i'm just saying the whole point of lifetime appointments was to remove some of the political dimension from what judges are asked to do and so the fact that that effect can be minimally detected at times is good mark go ahead yeah i think that is a good reason to be optimistic one of the cases that we're looking at that could be coming down very soon would be the fulton decision which could grant vast religious exemptions so naturally we are watching that case and that development extremely closely so do you think there is reason to be nervous about it or do you think it might the judges might follow precedent and follow their instructions a little bit on that given what you're seeing kind of the mood on the federal bench well it depends on what court that case is going to and i'll be honest i don't know very much about this case um but it depends on what court your suit is this lawsuit is going to who the judges are is this at the district level right now or is it at an appeals court level supreme oh this is supreme they just heard oral argument on it um this year um and i think reports from the oral arguments um were not encouraging for if you like civil rights we're talking about i see so if we're talking about the supreme court this makes it much more unique because we all know who's on the supreme court and the supreme court uh i mean we can all see the makeup of the supreme court it's it's leaning conservative pretty heavily so um at this point you know i don't know the details of this case this lawsuit but if you consider that i guess six out of the three on there or at least five out of the or six out of the nine or at least five out of the nine are pretty reliably going to lean to the right then this court is particularly tipped to the right so i think the supreme court generally speaking is a little bit easier to see how they're gonna roll on things i agree and it's it's really discouraging and you don't have to be a legal expert right so fault is a case that just while we're talking about it for people who are watching um is a case that has to do with the rights of christian based religious based adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex parents who want to adopt and so that made its way through the federal courts um out of pennsylvania i think and supreme court just heard oral arguments on it and um unfortunately i do think it is going to probably come out in a way that is not good for um civil rights expansion or children but um i would i would tend to agree with you on that and it's again it's not that hard to see on a case like this when you consider that most of the the judges on the supreme court are members of the federalist society which continues to be and you know an overlooked aspect to so many of our judges um and what that means is that at the core of of these particular justices belief systems are is the idea that you know religious freedom is of utmost importance and the lgbt rights are not um that women's rights are not that women's bodies are not considered uh under the control full control of women so we already know this we know this the federalist society justices have a pretty pretty core belief system that they are adhering to and in the case of religious freedom um they feel pretty strongly about it in almost every context right yay well if you have questions for jen bendery at from the huffington post ask them in the facebook comments or send an email to ask an atheist at ffrf.org jen there's a growing chorus for the need of judicial reform from expanding the number of lower court speech to even number uh even expanding the number of supreme court seats what are you hearing from the hill and the biden administration on court reform so i think um for all the talk during the presidential election about expanding the supreme court um that was sort of a a very lofty goal among progressives and judicial activists um and i think that biden's commission is looking at this um but i think in reality that is much more of a of a talking point it's more of a concept right now than something that we can expect to happen anytime soon if at all um adding seats to the supreme court would be a pretty big deal and i don't think that this senate has it in it to do that it's so close in there they're not they don't even want to mess with the filibuster really i mean they're starting to come around on it but expanding seats on the supreme court i think is a bit too far for a number of senators however i think that um i don't think i know that that there are senators in both parties um and in the house to pass a bill or members in the house to pass a bill that would expand the number of court seats on the lower courts on different district courts on different appeals courts and the reason it's bipartisan is because there are courts and both in senators and member states and both parties that are woefully uh overworked and they just they're very clearly understaffed and their workloads are almost unmanageable if not unmanageable and they just simply need more seats i mean that's just it's not hard to see right you know if you dig into the data so it's not everything doesn't have to be partisan i mean at least that's the hope and in this case it's a matter of pragmatism that certain courts are absolutely drowning and they need help and they haven't added seats to the lower courts in a long time systematically so you know i think it was even last fall that senator todd young from indiana introduced the bill to add more seats to the courts which is a he's a republican so it's right this is not just a blue versus red fight about courts and making everything democratic or everything republican it's it's a matter of having a judicial system function right and some courts are absolutely not functioning well enough right now because they're just so swamped so i think the chances for expanding seats on on lower courts are actually decent i mean the fact that a republican senator introduced the bill in the fall when it wasn't even i don't even know why he did that when he did it was like right around the election like it's not going to become law last year but but it shows that someone's willing to throw that down um a republican senator and it's not just for you know for kicks it's like that's a thing that both parties could absolutely get on board with right you could so it's so politicized and um you forget that these are actual courts with caseloads and there's a there's a huge administrative piece to this and i think um you were talking about how long it's been since um you know the the seats can only be expanded by congress and i i want to say it was the 80s or at least that's when another um the last time another circuit was added so and we know as a organization that files federal lawsuits um it routinely takes three to eight years for a civil lawsuit to you know um work its way through the federal courts um and sometimes it can take you know half a dozen years where you're you know in different phases of a federal lawsuit just at the district court level and a lot of that is just because of of clogged dockets and how far things get set out and when they're civil cases and they can be pushed back they are and that's administrative i mean there's nothing political about that so uh and i think that i think in a hyper politicized country right now um you know there's real people working on courts and there's real people who go before courts and it's a third branch of government it's sort of like the ugly step child of the three branches like people know talk about the white house and who the president is and people know about congress and they're passing their laws but there's also the judicial branch of government it's a whole branch by itself and and it hasn't been completely politicized at this point and it it has to function you know and i think especially maybe it's because i live in washington dc and everything people tend to throw everything through a political lens but it's true that we need our courts to work that's not partisan and when they're very clearly struggling to keep up with the amount of work that they have it's it's just not partisan it's like you know republicans and democrats in congress who go home are hearing from constituents who are like i i'm being discriminated against at work i'm going to sue my boss and i'm not going to have my hearing resolved for three years like i'm being discriminated against right now so what am i supposed to do for three years i mean it's just that's there's so many cases where you can't justice has to happen like now yeah so yeah so that's there's there's a lot of reasons why i can see members of congress in both parties supporting something like this in the next year or two so time is flying here mark so are you is it okay if i check for audience questions real quick go for it here's kind of an interesting one and i'm not i'm curious if you have an answer for this jen i don't know how closely you follow the actual supreme court docket but a question from a facebook commenter joshie is what do you think the most important case the supreme court will rule on in the next year is going to be given any thoughts on or even just kind of chatter on what is going to be a really big watched case coming from the supreme court in the next year i can't really point to one case because i don't know what they're looking at right now but i but more broadly speaking i think that because of the way the court is leaning right now as of amy coney barrett joining the court last fall you can bet that that conservatives are going to be racing to push issues through the court system to get to the supreme court right now to get to get their perspective uh reflected in the court decisions so anything to do with with abortion rights anything to do with same-sex marriage with anything to do with with gun gun control and gun safety think of all the issues that democrats tend to care about um those are the issues that conservatives will be lobbying and and filing lawsuits on specifically to try to get them all the way up to the supreme court to get them ruled on now right so i can't point to a specific case but i think it's important to think about what do conservatives really want the supreme court to weigh in on right now given how conservative the court is those are the issues that you should be watching right now because they who knows when the next supreme court justice is going to step down a lot of them are pretty old um you know there's a lot of talk about justice breyer you know he's he's up there um and how some democrats are like okay like you need to go let five replace you but you've also got clarence thomas for example and there's a lot of rumors about him stepping down last year and that didn't happen and he said it wasn't true but you never know what's true with justices and when they step down so if for anyone watching the court right now i think if you care about um some of the the issues that democrats as a party tend to care about those are the issues that are going to be um challenged yeah actively right now i mean we we know this this has become you know quiet part out loud i mean this is like the least surprising thing ever but we you have state lawmakers um that are still passing these more and more um restrictive abortion bans at the state level that are just openly saying in the in the legislative you know record that these are aimed at the supreme court they're aimed at roe versus wade um you know these five-week um you know abortion bans and things like that that are being passed in state legislatures in more than one state legislators are speaking up saying you know we we want the supreme court to take up our law we want to to have this law be the one that overturns or eviscerates roe versus wade so we know that um uh these big you know cultural hot button issues are being aimed right at the the 6-3 court right now and you can't you and i'm sorry to interrupt but you can't overlook the role that amy coney barrett is going to have she's the most recent justice and uh in her former uh in her former roles i mean she during her confirmation hearing it came up a lot that she she has suggested that roe versus wade was an erroneous decision in the past and she also called the affordable care act birth control benefit an assault on religious liberty so that's just a couple of examples of of her thinking that was back before she had to say she didn't have opinions on anything when she had her supreme court confirmation hearing so the best people can do is look at what a supreme court nominee has said in the past because they will not reveal anything in their confirmation hearing and so right i think anything related to abortion and um religious liberty is i mean that is what conservatives are looking at right now amy cooney barrett is they just cemented their the their their support for you know basically challenging and attacking anything to do with abortion rights under the uh under the guise of religious freedom and liberty right um there's a question here that's probably not quite for jen but i do want to um ask it so i can answer it which is does ffrf plan on creating an easy to find database to see which judges in our areas are not treating people equally on the basis of religion or so that we can pressure lawmakers to approve less biased judges i just want to point out that at the page where we are housing our report we also plan to as uh judges are being proposed and appointed and that's again at ffrf dot us judges you can find it you're looking at our regular url which is ffrf.org you can find it if you kind of go spelunking there but you can get to it directly at ffrff.usjudges you'll see our report and then in the months to come we um are planning to kind of update and um uh and kind of comment and blog a little bit about um who's being put forth as new nominees what's changing about the makeup of the courts um uh and hopefully people can kind of keep up with who's being uh who's being named who's being appointed who's being voted on and um you know we want the public to be really engaged and getting good information about the federal courts because it's become it's been this kind of dormant issue that has uh you know been this sleeping giant of conservative plotting and now it's just this existential issue to anything that progressives want to get done that will have to survive the federal courts so check that out at ffrf.us judges and um hopefully we will have some kind of updates to add soon as the biden administration gets going with appointees and i'm looking through other questions oh dan barker upstairs of ffrf co-president wants to know mark dan about the artwork behind you which we all have already asked you about off the air so uh my husband and i we went on a trip to senegal and we found these really great mosaic fabric paintings so what this is is a lot of fabrics that are put together from a lot of women's clothing and whether it's scarves or dresses and just a lot of the fashion that people wear in senegal is very dynamic and it's very bold and it makes a pretty uh good wall space and um jen as we were kind of turning to how senate the senate is changing a lot this year or in some cases maintaining the same just in different areas firebrand senators like ted cruz josh hawley and tom cotton are on senate judiciary committee and have fairly prominent platforms now to talk about their views and their ideas what are you hearing from the hill from staffers and members about how this dynamic is affecting the committee well i should say i'm not hearing anything specifically from people on the hill about these senators but i think it's it's fairly self-evident what's going on which is all three of those senators are in the minority and all three of the senators are are very likely going to be running for president in 2024 which means they will be using their role on the committee to grandstand and to make big statements and to pull pull to the right to try to outright each other i mean in some sense that would be really interesting to watch the three of them go at it with each other because they want to look like the most trumpy um senators that they can to try to win over trump's base of supporters in a couple of years so i fully expect them to to politicize the the judiciary committee hearings as much as possible solely with the presidential um election of 2024. they otherwise i mean they're in the minority they're already the three of them are already kind of um media hogs they like to make big splashes with very extreme and sometimes offensive comments but that appease some some trump supporters um so i don't expect anything different from them on this committee i mean they've already been mostly like that but you've got the three of them on there now i don't expect them to really you know act in good faith to to act ask questions of many judicial nominees they are simply by nominees that they do not want to be seen supporting and will probably vote no on all of them unless they are nominees from their own states that they agreed to in advance with the white house which i also i'm not sure how that's going to work because it's just become so partisan in there you know there's all kinds of ways they could not work with the white house to put forward any nominees to try to prevent biden from filling any seats in their states so that's a whole other kind of worms but all this to say i think they're going to be very political on the senate judiciary committee and i expect very little good faith work from them on the committee to actually weigh and vote out judges that they think are good judges so just to tie it up jen on um on filling open seats uh are we both on the judiciary committee and in the larger senate are we just majority rules here is it going to be 50 50. so is it just a matter of waiting for the byte administration to you know drop these nominees and then it's go time or what can we expect once we actually see some nominees and a list of candidates uh dropped to the senate well once once biden finally does announce some judicial nominees i think a lot of people are going their heads are going to explode because it will be finally some inkling of like where biden is heading with who he wants to make lifetime federal judges it'll give you a sense of okay who did he pick what's their backgrounds like let's pick them apart there will be countless stories written about like who are these people and what does it mean for biden's vision of the chords you know people read a lot into it i think um and then i think the idea is they'll start moving pretty quickly because not only is biden aware of what the last four years were under trump and how much of an effect that trump and mitch mcconnell had on the courts but he was also around when obama was president he was the vice president and during the obama years republicans actively repeatedly obstructed trump's or sorry obama's judicial nominees at almost every step of the way that you can in a judicial nomination process and that starts way before someone's even nominated i mean the whole judicial nomination process starts with senators recommending someone to the white house to fill a seat in their state so if you are a republican senator and you don't like obama because he's just obama he's a black president and you can't wrap your head around that you just some of them simply did not recommend anyone to obama to fill courts in their estates they would prefer to leave them empty for years sometimes and wait in the hope that a republican president will come along then they can recommend someone to that president who is more ideologically aligned with them so biden was around for years of republicans pulling pretty extreme measures to prevent obama from filling court seats and that's why trump inherited so many because they blocked obama so biden was around for that he's not gonna i think they learned their lesson they were very willing to work with republicans back then to fill seats and it didn't work out for them so here we are with biden now he's watched the last four years of of trump and mitch mcconnell just blanketing the courts with judges and he remembers i'm sure back then when they couldn't get anybody through even like totally non-controversial um bipartisan supported judicial nominees they still wouldn't support them i mean merrick garland is sort of the the classic example and he was a supreme court nominee so that's the highest court but that guy was he is so moderate and every even the republicans who wouldn't agree to give him a hearing couldn't help but say you know he's actually he's a pretty good guy like he'd probably be a great judge we're just not going to give him a hearing because obama so all that builds up to this moment and i don't think biden is going to wait and i think he might surprise people with how aggressive he actually is with this so i think once he nominates his first batch of judges i think that the white house is ready to go and i think their senator is ready to go with him because they know what happened before and even though biden's in office for another you know for four years on capitol hill you kind of view things in two-year increments right not four because currently the democrats run the white house the house and the senate they run all of it but that could easily and likely will change in 2022 so you've got this window that's shrinking and it shrinks even more because people are running for office in 2022 and that takes away from time spent in congress so suddenly four years under a biden for getting judges through is shrunk down to like what a year a year and a half until everything is kind of derailed and gone off in different directions so now now is the time i think and they know this that they've got to line up their nominees and just push them through because it could all change in in the fall of 2022 and then they can't do it anymore so expect i would say once they hit the ground they're going to keep running great great place to stop um i really hope that we can have jen back on once these names start dropping and all the ramming begins um i'm also really curious to come back sometime maybe in a year or more to talk about whatever comes of the blue ribbon commission on court reform and what we're talking about when we talk about court reform both administrative expansion or other ideas when the time comes but for this week that concludes ask an atheist thank you so much jen and thank you to everyone who's watching for joining us and be sure to check check out ffrf's broadcast tv program free thought matters this week annie laurie gaylor and dan barker speak with malachi mccourt an actor author radio host and well let's let him explain it during the week i am i'm an atheist and on sundays i'm a pagan because i believe in everything i believe in the sun shine i believe in the moon the beauty of clouds stars i believe in love i love my wife diana i love my children all nine of them my my five children nine grandchildren a great grandchild on the way i have uh wonderful loving friends and the world is just full of love that's all there is to it and i don't need um a god or any kind of deity to win give me love all right preach it malachi mccourt you can watch free thought matters on tv stations around the u.s on sunday mornings or you can catch them on ffrf's youtube and facebook channels also check out free thought radio that is ffrf's weekly radio show and podcasts you can find that at ffrf.org radio and if you want more information about the freedom from religion foundation check us out on the web at ffrf.org we will see you next time on ffrf's ask an atheist thank you again jen and goodbye [Music] freedom from religion [Music]

Channel: FFRF

Views: 5,441

Rating: 4.9197707 out of 5

Keywords: Jen Bendery, Huffington Post, Christian Nationalism, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Amy Coney Barrett, Mitch McConnell, Supreme Court, Ask An Atheist, FFRF, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Atheism, Atheist

Id: qJSsnutKCxY

Length: 51min 33sec (3093 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021