#1 – Evening Action – Make this call to YOUR FRIENDS & RELATIVES – “NO” on Thomas Farr for US District Judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina.
All the Senate Democrats are already all in against Thomas Farr. Now it’s up to your family and friends living under GOP rule to stop him. Contact them to call and email their Senator’s office tonight and first thing tomorrow. Script below…
Minimal Script: I’m calling from [zip code]. I would like the Senator [___] to oppose the seating of Thomas Farr to a seat on any U.S. District Court.
Here are all the senators’ contact information organized alphabetically by state: here.
Do they need encouragement? Send them this.
Background
This man, who the Rev. William J. Barber described in TIME magazine as “moral poison“, passed through the GOP-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee and is heading to the floor. He has misspent almost 40 years of his life aiding and abetting the fight to block full citizenship for all Americans.
“We will have to repent in this generation,” Dr. Martin Luther King wrote from an Alabama jail, “not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people… but for the appalling silence of the good people.” (Click here while your coffeemaker is working, for the list of six Republican supporters who decided to “honor” MLK Day on Twitter while voting to support Farr’s nomination to a lifetime seat on the federal bench.)
Thomas Alvin Farr has focused his legal career on disenfranchising voters of color and attacking workers’ rights. North Carolina Republicans call him when they need to dilute African-American votes and implement laws aimed at Black voters with “almost surgical precision.” For the last three decades, he represented the campaign of the ultraconservative Senator Jesse Helms at a time when the campaign was accused of intimidating black voters. (Don’t remember this? – read the horrifying things they did here.) Indeed, the courts have rebuked Farr’s most recent voting rights cases. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., described Farr as “probably the worst of the litter” when it comes to Trump’s judicial nominees. “Could this administration have picked an individual who is more hostile to the rights of minorities than this man? It is hard to imagine,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in the same committee hearing.
He routinely represents corporations that discriminate against both customers and workers. He defended Avis when outlets in North and South Carolina denied African Americans the right to rent cars on the same terms as white customers (Really?!? Avis, try harder!). He supported a North Carolina bill that prevented women who were discriminated against, or who were victims of workplace sexual harassment, from filing a lawsuit in state court, calling it a “better policy for the state.” He has also fought against workers’ efforts to unionize and was a staff attorney at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which has deep ties to the Koch brothers and was described by The Center for Media and Democracy as “a national leader in the effort to destroy public and private sector unions.”
Farr’s nomination is especially insulting because it’s for the nation’s longest judicial vacancy, the seat on the Eastern NC District Court that was denied to two highly-qualified African-American female nominees who Sen. Burr blocked from receiving a hearing. In fact, of the 48 people he’s nominated to appellate courts, none are black or Latino. Thirty-nine of them are men. Eighty percent come from the far-right Federalist Society, though only 4 percent of the nation’s lawyers are members. Thomas Farr has been a member since 1985.
INDIVISIBLE VENTURA 