U.S. Attorneys Offices

97.6 Percent Of Trump's U.S. Attorney Nominees Are Men

"It's a slap in the face."

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Line up of U.S. Attorney nominees.

Donald Trump has a lot of vacancies to fill. And after abruptly forcing out 46 Obama-era U.S. Attorneys earlier this year, those were nice chunk of positions to be filled. The good news — for those that are concerned about said vacancies — is that 42 of the positions have nominees. That’s a faster pace than Barack Obama, due to the mass firing of U.S. Attorneys (Obama gradually replaced the Bush-era holdovers).

The bad news is that only one of the 42 nominees is a woman. Compared with Obama, who had woman nominees for 12 of the first 42 U.S. Attorney openings, it reads as particularly dismaying. And as Zoe Tillman of Buzzfeed News notes, people are pissed:

“It’s a slap in the face,” said Joyce Vance, a former US attorney in Alabama who was one of Obama’s early nominees in 2009, of Trump’s decision to nominate predominantly men. “It’s a statement that this is not a priority.”

Vance said that in not elevating women to these positions, the administration was starting a chain reaction that would keep women lawyers out of leadership posts in the future.

“US attorneys often become judges, partners in big law firms, even senators, and restricting women from advancing by excluding them from the US attorney positions is really a giant step backwards,” Vance said.

… And in utterly unsurprising news, the American Constitution Society also found that Trump’s nominees are less diverse than Obama’s.

Liberals know that’s they’ll receive their fair share of knocks under a Republican president. That’s the nature of the two-party game. But under the Trump administration, stripped of the decorum and political savvy that have typified previous GOP presidents, it seems like the hits just keep on coming. Title IX enforcement is a thing of the past; climate change is verboten, despite the convergence of two historic storms within a week; the president is giving a pass to neo-Nazis; a special counsel is investigating the administration’s potential collusion with Russia; and conflict with a nuclear North Korea looks more likely than ever.

So it is tempting to brush this latest insult off as minor. That impulse must be resisted. As Christopher Kang, who worked on federal court and law enforcement nominees under Obama, told Buzzfeed, these appointments matter for the perception of fairness in the justice system:

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“When you’re talking about the justice system — and with respect to US attorneys the criminal justice system in particular — having a more diverse set of US attorneys really helps instill greater confidence in the entire system. It is more reflective of the entire population,” Kang said. “It gives you a better sense that these are candidates being selected from the broadest and deepest pool of potential applicants.”

There are other, more diverse candidates out there. The administration has simply decided finding them is not important.

Congratulations to Jessie Liu as the president’s sole female nominee for a U.S. Attorney. But there really ought to be greater diversity in the position.

headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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