Courts

Right-Wing Judicial Nominee Scuttled For 'Being An Actual Lawyer'

Understanding the law used to be a positive.

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Senator Josh Hawley

Michael Bogren was another in the long line of Trump judicial nominees intended to open the Seventh Seal and usher in a thousand years of capricious originalism. But now he’s withdrawn from his pursuit of the federal bench because firebrand right-wing legislators objected to Bogren’s persnickety fidelity to the nation’s “laws.”

Bogren defended the City of East Lansing in a suit brought by a couple who were barred from a town-sponsored Farmers’ Market because while they rented their farm out for weddings, they refused to allow same-sex weddings. This is a pretty clear-cut case of discrimination and Bogren signed off on a brief that cited all the appropriate precedent. But that precedent mostly involves KKK-affiliated businesses refusing to serve black people and that stuck in the craw of legislators who worried that Bogren may not be the bigot Leonard Leo promised them:

Hawley objected to a legal brief in which Bogren, representing the city, compared the situation to a business owned by a member of the Ku Klux Klan member refusing to serve African Americans and citing religious liberty as a justification.

“He could have given a vigorous defense to his client without stooping to calling this Catholic family equivalent to members of the KKK, comparing them to radical Islamic jihadists,” Hawley said Tuesday in his first public comments since Bogren’s withdrawal was reported.

Josh Hawley went to Yale and served as Attorney General of Missouri and if he really doesn’t understand how precedent works then the rumors that Yale isn’t a real, practical law school are wholly confirmed. In reality, Hawley does know how legal advocacy works but is an opportunistic grifter willing to sully Yale’s good name to score political points off the fact that most people don’t understand basic law. But he kicked up enough of a storm among ill-informed chattering classes to force Bogren off the job.

In this case, the precedent involved a Klan member literally invoking religious liberty as an argument to refuse service to black people. It’s entirely on point and it is not besmirching this couple — though, as a Catholic, I’m willing to say they deserve all the besmirching imaginable — to point out that the law places a limit on the extent to which “religious liberty” can serve as a justification for discrimination.

The more hoity-toity right-wingers are up in arms over Hawley and his merry band of dittoheads upending Bogren’s nomination. David Bernstein, executive director of the Liberty and Law Center at ASSLaw:

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“Hawley chose to demagogue the issue, accusing Bogren of comparing traditional Catholic beliefs to those of the KKK, and more generally of exhibiting hostility toward Catholicism,” Bernstein said in a post on the Libertarian site Reason.com.

This is where the Reagan Revolution begins to eat its children. Hawley, along with Harvard’s Ted Cruz and non-lawyer Thom Tillis are now willfully misrepresenting the law and blowing up one of the frighteningly rare qualified conservative judicial nominees to bay to the lowest common denominator. You asked for this unholy alliance Bernstein, don’t go crying to the Ayn Rand message boards when it comes back to bite the nominees you love.

Bogren will now return to Plunkett Cooney and do the actual job of being a lawyer that ironically kept him from the bench.

Trump judicial nominee withdraws after Hawley’s accusations of anti-Catholic bigotry [Kansas City Star]

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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