ABA Defends Judge Nominee Vetting Process in Letter to Bondi (1)

The American Bar Association defended its process for vetting judicial nominees after the Justice Department blocked the organization from evaluating President Donald Trump’s picks for the federal bench.

In a letter Tuesday to Attorney General Pam Bondi, ABA president William Bay said the organization is “both surprised and disappointed” in the Justice Department’s decision.

“The changes the Justice Department is apparently imposing will likely result in less transparency in the process of confirming nominees to lifetime appointments on the federal bench and appear to be based on incorrect information set forth in your letter,” Bay said.

The ABA’s standing committee, which is independent from the larger organization, is a 15-member panel that’s helped vet judicial nominees since the Eisenhower era. Its members, including the chair, are appointed by the association’s president to three-year terms. The ranks have included trial attorneys, law professors, and Big Law partners.

Trump, like George W. Bush before him, had cut off the ABA’s ability to vet candidates before they were nominated, a practice Joe Biden continued. The move represents a further diminishment of the ABA’s role in the vetting of presidents’ judicial nominees.

In a May 29 letter addressed to Bay, Bondi said the ABA was “no longer a fair arbiter of nominees’ qualifications” and that its ratings favor Democrat-tapped nominees. The ABA at first said it hadn’t received Bondi’s letter but later issued a revision saying it had.

Bay also defended that the standing committee has issued “Well Qualified” or “Qualified” ratings to “no less than 96.9% of the rated nominees in each administration during the last two decades,” including under the Trump administration. The committee rated all three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees as well qualified.

“There is no one else doing the type of in-depth, independent evaluation that the Standing Committee does,” Bay said.

The Trump Justice Department in his second term has limited employee participation at the organization’s events and threatening its law school accreditation powers over law school diversity mandates.

The ABA, in turn, has publicly criticized threats against federal judges and joined litigation against the government, amid attacks on law firms and courts by the Trump administration.

Bay defended the standing committee’s independence from the rest of the volunteer lawyer network’s operations.

“The Standing Committee’s work is insulated from all other activities of the ABA to ensure its independence and impartiality,” Bay said.