Nomination of Thomas Farr

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, later this afternoon, the Senate is scheduled to vote on the confirmation of Mr. Thomas Farr for the Eastern District of North Carolina. I have made my opposition to this nominee clear on a daily basis, but allow me to remind my colleagues, to recap, before this vote just what we are dealing with here. We are being asked to confirm the go-to guy in North Carolina if you need a lawyer to defend voter suppression. Some might think that is hyperbolic, but I sincerely ask my colleagues not to go for hyperbole but to look at the evidence.

Mr. Farr was the lead lawyer in defending North Carolina's discriminatory congressional maps drawn by the State's Republicans, which were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. This is a very conservative Supreme Court, which has been mostly unsympathetic to arguments of disenfranchisement--as evidenced by the Shelby County case--but in this instance, they could not help but overturn the map for racial discrimination, despite the evidence provided by Mr. Farr.

Mr. Farr was also the lead lawyer in defense of North Carolina's insidious voter ID law, which the Supreme Court ruled ``targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision''--targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.

North Carolina's Republicans designed the law after asking for and receiving data sorted by race on voting practices. Mr. Farr not only defended the law, he described the voting restrictions, which forbade the use of government employee IDs, student IDs, and IDs used for public assistance, as ``a minor inconvenience.''

That is only Mr. Farr's recent history involving voting suppression. If we go back and look at the campaign of Senator Jesse Helms in 1990, Mr. Farr represented the Helms campaign and defended it against accusations that it sent over 120,000 postcards, almost exclusively to Black voters, that falsely warned them they could be charged with a crime if they tried to vote--falsely--falsely warned them. The mailers were sent after statistics emerged that African-American registration was outpacing White voter registration.

The sordid history of Mr. Farr's efforts to suppress voting goes back even further. Mr. Farr was a member of Senator Jesse Helms' 1984 campaign. In that campaign, he wasn't merely a hired gun; he was a close legal associate of Senator Helms, a man David Broder of the Washington Post called ``the last prominent unabashed White racist politician in this country.''

In that 1984 campaign, according to memoranda by the Voting Rights section of the Department of Justice, Mr. Farr was involved in the so- called ``ballot security'' program run by the Helms campaign and the North Carolina Republican Party. The so-called ballot security program included sending postcards to minority voters in an effort to suppress voting.

In 2006, Mr. Farr's association with these noxious voter suppression attempts by Helms' campaign was enough to deny him confirmation to this very seat. In the intervening years, he has not repented or even moved on to different issues. He is still defending attempts to disenfranchise African-American voters.

I am not from North Carolina, but if I were, I would be embarrassed to have this man nominated and placed on the Federal bench. It takes but an ounce of principle to say: No, I am not defending discrimination and voter suppression. Yet, time and time and time again, not just 1984, not just 1990 but 2013 and 2015, Mr. Thomas Farr has stepped up to the plate to represent and defend voter suppression in a court of law, and we are being asked to reward him--reward him for these activities--with a lifetime appointment as a Federal judge in a district that is 27 percent African American, where he will have the power to make decisions on voting rights and civil rights for a generation.

I prevail upon the conscience of my Republican colleagues, who I know want to be fair to this man, look at the body of evidence impartially. There is simply a preponderance of evidence that Mr. Farr was involved, often intimately, in decades of voter suppression in North Carolina. The standard for this vote is not whether or how Mr. Farr should be punished or excoriated for what he did but a much higher one: whether a man with this history deserves to be elevated to a lifetime appointment on the Federal bench.

Whether you are Republican or Democratic, a liberal or conservative, that has to be--has to be--disqualifying for a seat on the Federal bench.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source