American Bar Association escalates battle with Trump admin

The American Bar Association (ABA) escalated its battle against the Trump administration by filing a new lawsuit on Monday.

The conflict has been simmering for months as the Department of Justice (DOJ) has taken steps to limit the association’s influence and the ABA has opposed the administration’s actions in public statements and litigation.

“Since taking office earlier this year, President Trump has used the vast powers of the Executive Branch to coerce lawyers and law firms to abandon clients, causes, and policy positions the President does not like,” the ABA’s lawsuit states, citing several executive orders President Donald Trump issued stripping major firms of government contracts and access.

The ABA is a party in at least three other cases against the administration, including lawsuits over United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funds, the termination of contracts to provide legal services migrants facing deportation and the termination of DOJ domestic violence and sexual assault related grants.

George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School professor Robert Luther III, a former White House lawyer who worked on judicial nominations during Trump’s first term, said the ABA is “resorting to desperate methods like litigation against the Trump administration to retain their relevance.”

“The ABA is highly-partisan left-wing organization with a long history of discriminating against exceptional judicial nominees from Republican presidents — Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, Frank Easterbrook, Daniel Manion, Edith Jones, and Kat Mizelle — have all suffered inexcusable hits to their reputation based on the ABA’s partisan vetting process,” he told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I’m glad to see Attorney General Bondi continue the trend of cutting out the ABA from the judicial nominations vetting process that began during President Trump’s first term.”

Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi cut ABA out of the judicial vetting process, saying it will “no longer direct nominees to provide waivers allowing the ABA access to nonpublic information” like bar records or to participate in the organization’s questionnaires and interviews.

The ABA has played a role in vetting candidates since President Dwight Eisenhower requested their input in 1953. President George W. Bush later kept the association out of evaluating candidates prior to nomination, a policy President Joe Biden also adopted.

“Unfortunately, the ABA no longer functions as a fair arbiter of nominees’ qualifications, and its ratings invariably and demonstrably favor nominees put forth by Democratic administrations,” Bondi wrote in a May 29 letter. “The ABA’s steadfast refusal to fix the bias in its ratings process, despite criticism from Congress, the Administration, and the academy, is disquieting.”

ABA replied that the operations of its Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary are “separate and independent,” noting it rated all three of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees as well qualified. The association rated eight of Trump’s nominees “Not Qualified” during his first term, however.

The DOJ previously restricted its attorneys from attending or speaking at ABA events and threatened to revoke the association’s status as the sole accrediting body for law schools over its diversity requirements.

South Texas College of Law Houston law professor Josh Blackman wrote in an ABA Journal article last year that the organization’s future depends on greater “ideological diversity.”

“If the ABA does not arrest its progressive lurch, the organization risks its own obsolescence. Model Rules will not be adopted,” he wrote. “Evaluations of judicial nominees will be ignored. The accreditation monopoly will cease. And so on. A decline in membership will be the least of the ABA’s problems. The ABA can either adapt to a new political reality or fade away like the guilds of yore.”

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