November 18, 2018

Trump's judicial choices have problems beyond the law

Mother Jones -President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees have had some unusual hobbies and pet causes. Alabama District Court nominee Brett Talley is an amateur ghost-hunter and horror novelist. (The White House withdrew his nomination after it was revealed that he’d blogged favorably about the Ku Klux Klan.) Don Willett, confirmed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, opposes same-sex marriage but once tweeted that he “could support recognizing a constitutional right to marry bacon.” Add to that list Neomi Rao, Trump’s nominee to replace Brett Kavanaugh on the powerful DC Circuit, who has written at least two law review articles and a blog post in which she defended dwarf-tossing.

Especially popular in Florida bars, dwarf-tossing is the strange spectacle in which competitors throw Velcro-clad little people at a wall or mattress like a shotput. The longest toss wins. The sport has been banned in some American states and parts of France, where a judge upheld such bans because of “considerations of human dignity.” Rao considers these laws an affront to individual liberty that fails to recognize the right of the dwarf to be tossed. In one article, she wrote that the decision in France upholding the dwarf-tossing ban was an example of “dignity as coercion” and that it “demonstrates how concepts of dignity can be used to coerce individuals by forcing upon them a particular understanding of dignity.”

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